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Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

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101–107 of 107 posts

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#101
post #9

Is GNSS jamming really as bad a problem as the article makes it seem? The article itself reads like guerilla advertising so I'm inclined not to take it at face value.

Near a warzone with consumer hardware? Yes. Military hardware uses different signals, encryption, more advanced receivers, etc etc, but these things are on ITAR lists and not shared with the public. It's a little surprising to me that there's a commercial venture that has been allowed to provide these things to the public at some point.

Because ITAR only applies to US companies, non-US companies can do and sell whatever they want. My favorite example is CRPA antenna, where they can block the jamming signal, so it was on ITAR. Other countries like Turkey and China doesn't care so you can even buy one of them in alibaba. They got all the money while the US company can't compete because they're not allowed to, so after several lobbying efforts, that technology got downgraded from ITAR, very toxic export control, to EAR, your normal export control.

Another example is high frame rate thermal camera, US companies are banned from exporting cameras above 9 fps, while chinese companies freely sells 50 fps cameras

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#102
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bigger WTF is why critical systems still use unencrypted gps signal. It is like using plain SMTP emails for banking transactions, and relying on "sender" for authentification.

An even bigger WTF is why GPS data isn't signed with some official key so spoofing is impossible.

[deleted]

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#103
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

add on top of this that oven controlled crystal oscillators (or any more performant technologies if affordable) would be selected by militaries...

I'm unaware of any technology between OCXOs and Rb standards. The latter have gotten smaller but not tiny and also need quite a bit of ongoing maintenance and calibration.

Microchip has some "chip-scale atomic clock"s, not much bigger than an OCXO, but a lot more expensive.

https://www.microchip.com/en-us/product/csac-sa65

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s jammed!

This is a lucid way to think of enshittification in general and of the advertising business in particular: jamming the information signal.

This is why Russian propaganda always tastes like cherries.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t this the exact problem tree-based broadcast encryption schemes were designed to solve? You could surgically revoke the keys of a bad actor, and I’m not exactly sure, but I think the scope of their ability to affect the jamming resistance of other users is necessarily limited by the tree.

Indeed you can revoke anyone's keys any time with such a scheme. But a single leaked and unrevoked key is still enough to jam it for everyone. Obviously you could have some "revoke each players keys in turn until the jamming stops" scheme, but it seems suboptimal.

I would think you could, in principle, deduce the bad key from a recorded segment of the jamming signal, and only revoke when identified.

I would have to look at the math more specifically, but I would think it would be impossible to both disguise the compromised key and take advantage of the key to interfere with the signal in the way its designed to prevent. And even if you did, I’m fairly sure the jamming would only affect users whose decryption runs through your branch, and in your geographic proximity so I don’t think it would have an advantage of countering the below the noise floor decryption designed to mitigate against jamming.

Re: Satellite reveals immense scale of GPS signal tampering

#107
post #59

US is not even investing in GPS anymore. Their L5 signal has been in experimental operation for probably over a decade, still "experimental".

The US invested $8 billion into upgrades... and then killed off the program due to tons of problems with the upgrades[1]: > However, the program was unable to deliver needed capabilities on an operationally relevant timeline at an acceptable level of risk to meet the GPS constellation modernization needs. Hopefully the newer equipment and incremental improvements can bridge over to whatever's next. [1] https://www.sp…

LEO is the future, if they somehow switch to starlink, I'd consider it as a big win, actually a huuuge win.
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