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The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

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Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#51

Post by SllX »

DANmode wrote: post #49
SllX wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience with 404 Media is that they treat every article like they've just released the Pentagon Papers I think you’ve perfectly phrased exactly what it is that annoys me when I see a 404 Media headline. When it was a new shop, I stomached it more, but this is every single headline I ever see from them.

Contrasting the tone of innocence the larger publications use around these institutions feels perfectly within a journalistic mandate.

Nobody is disputing that it is a legitimate choice. It is also legitimately off-putting.

If their audience is into it though, good for them.

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#52

Post by dabluecaboose »

spwa4 wrote: post #24
7777777phil wrote: post #6

Slightly related the latest Veritasium Video: Something is jamming GPS over Europe. https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA

TLDW: Russia is jamming GPS and GNSS over Europe, purposefully, using a constellation of military satellites. Theory is that Russia is constantly practicing to totally disrupt GPS and GNSS (and the Chinese system) across all of Europe.

GNSS is just the catch-all term. It stands for "Global Navigation Satellite System".

The Chinese system is called BeiDou.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_navigation#BeiDou_(2...

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#53

Post by Lammy »

anigbrowl wrote: post #42

The story links to the current issue of the Inside GNSS magazine but the article isn't available in the digital edition, apparently. It's in the print edition, readable at https://lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=... The source data and analytical code (in Julia) is also available at https://lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=... In my view people nitpicking the 404 media story are…

> May 26, 2011

> No publicly recorded NANU announces a fleet-wide event of this kind in the surrounding window.

I do remember living through this one in February 2011 which was very strange at the time: https://web.archive.org/web/20111015232120/http://navcen.usc...

“SOUTHEAST ATLANTIC COAST: GPS Testing Information THE GPS NAVIGATION SIGNALS MAY BE UNRELIABLE FROM 20 JAN 2011 - 22 FEB 2011 FROM 0000Z - 0245Z DUE TO TESTING ON GPS FREQUENCIES USED IN SHIPBOARD NAVIGATION AND HANDHELD SYSTEMS. GPS SYSTEMS THAT RELY ON GPS, SUCH AS E-911, AIS AND DSC, MAY BE AFFECTED WITHIN A 150 NM RADIUS OF POSITION 30 49.09N 80 28.18W. DURING THIS PERIOD GPS USERS ARE ENCOURAGED TO REPORT ANY GPS SERVICE OUTAGES THAT THEY MAY EXPERIENCE DURING THIS TESTING VIA THE NAVIGATION INFORMATION SERVICE (NIS) BY CALLING (703) 313-5900 OR BY USING THE NAVCEN WEB SITE'S GPS REPORT A PROBLEM WORKSHEET AT WWW.NAVCEN.USCG.GOV.”

I specifically remember it because I was trying to navigate to the Atlanta IKEA but my phone showed me as being, like, south of Macon; ~100mi of error. That timeframe could fit if they were testing something like key availability in a spoofing scenario before enabling real key material transmission.

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#54

Post by moritzwarhier »

moritzwarhier wrote: post #12
zerobees wrote: post #7

"Numbers station" is a weird analogy, because the idea of a numbers station was to broadcast messages to undercover operatives in a way that can be received using unmodified (and therefore non-suspicious) household radio receivers. Here, it appears to be a rekeying system for specialized military gear.

I think it's simply because of using a public channel for encrypted communication.

Thanks for all the replies: my phrasing was indeed bad I guess!

A "public channel" is a very broad definition, and most communication channels, including those used for encrypted communication, are by design more or less "public".

Situation with GPS that feels similar to "number stations" (which I only know about thanks to Boards of Canada's album "Geogaddi", tbh^^) is that encrypted messages are deliberatily broadcasted, not that the channel is in some way "public". The latter also applies to all encrypted internet traffic, I guess.

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#55

Post by wildzzz »

sgjohnson wrote: post #26
tokai wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its all comes down to what we buy as the definition for a number station. For me a number station needs sends a message to be a number station, not a key.

>For me a number station needs sends a message to be a number station, not a key. We don't know that it's a key that's being sent. For all we know, it could be just random data. Obviously it's most likely not random data, but ciphertext. Either way, we have no idea what the message is.

It is kind of like a number station but it's meant for machine to machine communication of commands, keys, and probably test messages specifically for military GPS receivers. The US government has plenty of other satellites (and the internet) at its disposal for sending messages to people covertly. They don't need to risk screwing up critical infrastructure just to send a message to someone. It also wouldn't be prudent to give a secret agent something so obviously a piece of spycraft. There's plenty of off-the-shelf radio receivers you can buy worldwide that would be capable of picking up an encoded message transmitted by a passing satellite.

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#56

Post by DANmode »

SllX wrote: post #51
DANmode wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Contrasting the tone of innocence the larger publications use around these institutions feels perfectly within a journalistic mandate.

Nobody is disputing that it is a legitimate choice. It is also legitimately off-putting. If their audience is into it though, good for them.

Honestly, I was surprised to see this take.

Their tone just makes me miss the original The Intercept and other used-to-be-heavy-hitters.

Were they also too punchy for you? (I sound possibly sarcastic, but am genuinely curious)

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#57

Post by cryzinger »

DANmode wrote: post #49
SllX wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My experience with 404 Media is that they treat every article like they've just released the Pentagon Papers I think you’ve perfectly phrased exactly what it is that annoys me when I see a 404 Media headline. When it was a new shop, I stomached it more, but this is every single headline I ever see from them.

Contrasting the tone of innocence the larger publications use around these institutions feels perfectly within a journalistic mandate.

For new and under-reported (or otherwise downplayed) stories, I think it's understandable and maybe even good. But when every single story has a breathless, scandalized headline, it gets exhausting fast, and it's hard for me to know what to pay attention to.

I remember last year 404 put out a clickbait-y story about the shitty "covert" websites that the CIA used to communicate with spies they'd recruited in Iran, even though it was old news at that point. If you only read the headline (as many people do...) you'd think it was a startling new development.

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#58

Post by buredoranna »

Since we're talking numbers stations...

I'll take this opportunity to plug the CONET project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project

https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project

[edit: formatting]

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#59

Post by rcxdude »

timeinput wrote: post #17
rcxdude wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with the guy credited in the article before, so I'll vouch for his general credibility and the underlying information likely being solid: there's good evidence for this field being some kind of encrypted data stream, probably key distribution, and the behaviour has changed over time. But the breathless LLM-tone really did make it hard to read.

Cool. Some data may have been transmitted over GPS. That's interesting and note worthy. If only that was all that was posted. Instead there's this stuff that makes me question Steven Murdoch's research practices. If you're willing to publish slop are his research practices slop? Can I trust any paper he creates in the future when I can tell this one has factual errors? Why should I bother reading it? I actually think…

I agree

Re: The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

#60

Post by kotaKat »

05 wrote: post #45
rafram wrote: post #20

Clickbait from 404 Media? Surely not! The part they kept out of the headline: > for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals It’s common knowledge that the military has access to a separate, encrypted, higher-precision GPS signal. “Numbers station” implies that they’re distributing unrelated encrypted information, but they’re not; it’s not surprising that GPS signals would be used to delive…

> has access to a separate, encrypted, higher-precision GPS signal. That's not it, though. This is available on the consumer L1 band, and you can even read that info using a $5 Ublox receiver (UBX-RXM-SFRBX command).

Yeah, but the DAGRs out there hop around on both sets. You can run a DAGR without keys and it'll use civ GPS just fine. It'd make sense to have the hidden OTAR/OTAP running on a hidden chunk of L1 traffic.

https://www.baesystems.com/en/product/defense-advanced-gps-r...

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