GPS is permanently jammed/spoofed around Kremlin. It is tough to drive there if you are not local.
Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
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Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#32GPS spoofing is a big part of the Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies”. Funny that in a movie it seemed totally fake, something invented for the plot, and yet here I see it’s a real thing.
Interesting how truth can be too much for fiction sometimes.
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#33To be fair, the report is authored by an US entity. I'm sure if they could have studied US operations without losing their funding they would have found similar deployments by US forces, albeit, I think not as widespread. The US has always seemed to have better tech, and GPS spoofing is cheap, from what the article states, which makes it ideal for the cash-bootstrapped Russian military.
> The US has always seemed to have better tech
While the US can spend a lot more on its military and has a corresponding lead, the US is mostly focused on offensive technology (like its carrier groups). Russia, being geographically much closer to "enemy" territory, has a much bigger focus on defensive capabilities and excels in many areas. For example the Russian S400 air defense system is usually seen as superior to the American Patriot system.
With GPS spoofing being mostly a defensive technology it seems exactly like the thing Russia would focus on and the US would neglect.
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#34Wouldn't it be possible to mitigate some of the effect of these spoofers using on-board navigation system with an IMU? Or it least allow for it's detection?
It depends on what you are doing. ICBMs predate GPS, so for anything flying you can fall back to the old way of comparing terrain height to known maps. This is reliable and a widely-implemented technique (at least in weaponry).
If that's not an option you can use an IMU, but because of errors adding up over time IMUs aren't all that great if you can't calibrate from time to time. Satellites do it by looking at stars, if you're a car you might look at the streets and compare them to maps.
The only things that really have fundamental problems without GPS are ships and anything that flies over water. In any other application GPS is used because it's cheap to implement and reliable, not because it's the only way to do it.
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#35Wouldn't it be possible to mitigate some of the effect of these spoofers using on-board navigation system with an IMU? Or it least allow for it's detection?
You can make spoofing harder. Most of these spoofing attacks target off-the-self drone GSP, and don't work against adversary who plan against them. If you want to spoof more expensive gear, like those used in commercial shipping, you do it gradually. You start by transmitting the correct coordinates and then gradually start to increase the difference between correct and false coordinates. When done gradually, IMU can…
This has been demonstrated on commercial shipping using the exact technique you described:
https://news.utexas.edu/2013/07/29/ut-austin-researchers-suc...
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#36Wouldn't it be possible to mitigate some of the effect of these spoofers using on-board navigation system with an IMU? Or it least allow for it's detection?
You can (should) throw more sensors with different characteristics at a Kalman filter for enhanced results in the presence of noise. The wiki page is actually excellent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
In the example presented some of the inputs could include direction finding to local broadcasters, a GLONASS receiver, a heading indicator and distance traveled odometer if we're talking a road vehicle, and many other things limited only by your imagination and resources at hand.
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
Full-blown spoofing, ie, being able to generate a 'valid' sui generis GPS signal is effectively ruled out by encryption. However a replay attack that uses a valid signal received at some other locate re-broadcast at a second place is not affected by encryption. You can imagine lots of clever ways to use a re-broadcast attack to draw a drone off course.
>However a replay attack that uses a valid signal received at some other locate re-broadcast at a second place is not affected by encryption. That seems like a pretty obvious and absurd sort of vulnerability.
Sure, but one that's almost impossible to defend against it. Any viable defense has to happen on the client side with something like an antenna array to distuingish broadcasts from space from replay attacks, or a clock accurate enough to detect that the broadcasted time is off by dozens of microseconds and thus has to be a replay.
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#38If I understand it correctly, the spoofing works by replaying the original signal delayed in time but at a higher power so the receiver selects your better spoofed signal. I wonder if it would be possible for the receiver to compute what the appropriate signal level should be and if it is too strong that could be a way of detecting if you are receiving a spoofed signal ?
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
GPS time is monotonously increasing. If you ignore all messages with timestamps lower than the last one received, and check their digital signatures, you should be protected against replay attacks at least until the next cold restart (or GPS time counter reset, which is once in 20 years). There are other possibilities (CTR/CFB encryption modes, relying on increasing counter and/or previous messages contents). Or am I…
TLDR: you essentially never see repeated time stamps. GPS time is broadcast in the very low bit rate (50 BPS) NAV message, once every 6 seconds. In between the receiver counts at the chip rate (1023 kHz) just counting signal transitions. A rebroadcast attack happens at the speed of light. A signal is received at Moscow airport and is beamed to the Kremlin via some alternate transport path. At the Kremlin the signal i…
Why not? Is the original signal is somehow not going through? If it does, it does not matter the other is stronger. It will arrive later with the same timestamp.
Re: Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Full-blown spoofing, ie, being able to generate a 'valid' sui generis GPS signal is effectively ruled out by encryption. However a replay attack that uses a valid signal received at some other locate re-broadcast at a second place is not affected by encryption. You can imagine lots of clever ways to use a re-broadcast attack to draw a drone off course.
>However a replay attack that uses a valid signal received at some other locate re-broadcast at a second place is not affected by encryption. That seems like a pretty obvious and absurd sort of vulnerability.
A detailed solution that addresses all of the stakeholder's equities in the PNT space would be welcome.
It is, however, a very long-standing issue that has been addressed by some of the best minds in physics and technology, with many billions of dollars available to them.
Do you have any suggestions?