Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

TL:DR: Israel and Iran are the source of the spoofing.

Edited*

And Iran, according to the article
- Israel Iran and Russia be like
Wow. The state of Israel is really piling on the reasons to hate it these days.
- It was doing this for decades but Western countries only start hearing about it.
  Social media have prevailed over classic media, and this time they have proven to be harder to steer.
And Russia was doing it just a few years ago, too.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/vladimir-putin/russia-spoofing-gps-vast-scale-stop-drones-approaching-putin-report-n987376#
The article says the spoofing was first recorded in September from Iran, then Israel started doing some after the October Hammas attacks
Iran has been doing this shit for decades. I'm sure Israel has too.
Basically, they figure out what a GPS receiver would hear if it was receiving signals from a specific location, say "London". They then broadcast those exact signals. Any receiver that hears them now thinks it is in "London".
Start with the aircraft's actual position, and update the spoofed location based where it actually is and and its intended destination, and you can get it to go where you want it.
If the aircraft is trying to fly to London, for example,, and you want it to turn to the east of its track, you start spoofing that it has drifted west on its track to London. The aircraft thinks it is west of London, and turns to the east to get to spoofed-London.
- Actually, the issue is far more complicated than that.

The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission

Tomorrow Never Dies continues to be bizarrely relevant.

Is that the one with Jonathan Pryce as the villain? That was a good one
- Johnathan Pryce as the mad, egocentric head of a mass media and tech empire with an inordinate amount of reach and influence on the world stage, who is chiefly concerned with becoming the sole source of media in a post-CCP China.
  Which sounds funny and ridiculous in a 1997 spy movie, but in the last 20 years, we've seen just how much power mass media companies wield, how they can manipulate sizable percentages of a population, and how being the exclusive source of news for an entire country (China, no less) would give a media mogul incredible power and influence.

Fucking serves them right, the aviation industry have been buying GPS devices for decades that bleed outside and don't explicitly filter down to their spectrum. There was a satellite internet startup in the US that went through the whole process, bought its spectrum and was ready to launch, then the aviation industry complained and had them shut down because their devices were all shit and "it would be too difficult to change everyone's equipment".

Do you have something I can read about this? It's a little vague, so hard for me to search, and it sounds like something I would be interested in. Thanks
- Pretty sure this is the story, rings true to my memory of the company name starting with "L": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/lightsquared-broadband-a-threat-to-gps/
  Although this article doesn't cover how the GPS systems used cheap filtering circuits that didn't adequately filter out adjacent frequencies. This was done purely to save money, because there wasn't anything using the adjacent frequencies. As a result, LightSquared went bankrupt in 2012.

That just means you can't use autoland in low visibility conditions. Modern IRUs (inertial reference unit) are highly accurate laser gyros that can use GPS for correction, but will throw out the data if it doesn't make sense. Navigation won't be affected much, and autoland (if used) will still rely on VHF guidance.

Modern IRUs also take input from multiple sources (GPS, Navaids) to update their drift error. With spoofed GPS, bad drift corrections are made and when the navigation solution eventually fails the IRU is just as unusable.
- ADIRUs will throw out bad GPS data if it disagrees with multiple IRUs, hence why there's usually 3 on the aircraft. That being said, if the GPS is close enough to the three, then correction will still be applied.
  If they're using the older IRUs, the drift is corrected via redundancy and not GPS. Usually pilots will report drift based on their final IRU coordinates compared against GPS. Even then, they should still be checking their course with VOR.
How do IRUs work do to give you location?
- Imagine you can't see or hear anything but you can read a compass, and you have an internal map of your house and neighborhood. You also know how long your steps are with some amount of accuracy. You would probably be able to get out of your house and maybe to the corner store, but the inaccuracies in your compass and distance estimation would add up over time, and on a long walk you might overshoot the sidewalk and walk down the middle of a busy street by mistake.
- They know where you took off from, and can detect your movement with precision.
- It's knows where it was and where it isn't
- They use gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the aircrafts movement from the starting position at takeoff. That can then be used to plot the course the aircraft has taken to show the current location.
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_reckoning
- First, they have to align on the ground. You initialize them with your current known position (usually by GPS or your known airport/gate spot). Then, you wait for them to synchronize with the Earth's rotation. If you're far north, like in Alaska, this could take half an hour. If you're close to the equator, it could take 5 minutes. Once they're ready, from that point, any movement you make, it will know where you are and where you've been.
  If you spin up a gyro and begin moving around, it will maintain it's starting position. You can use this deflection to calculate direction. If you know how fast you are going and for how long, you'll have your position.
  Mechanical gyros drift. It's the nature of a world with friction. Newer IRUs use laser gyros, so the only real drift they have comes from extremely minute rounding errors.
But the article mentioned that "the spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System". How?
- Yeah I have the same question. Based upon a comment above, it looks like the independent gyro system is updated for drift based upon the spoofed GPS data and thus causes issues. If the IRS is not updated at all then drift becomes a bigger issue but if it’s updated regularly with valid GPS data then it’s a good thing. So the challenge is to only update the gyro drift with valid GPS data which I am guessing is hard to determine.
- If it's a smaller plane (such as a CRJ / ERJ) with only one IRU, it will not be able to determine if GPS is valid or not, so the drift correction gets spoiled.
  Large commercial aircraft are using 3 IRUs, with newer aircraft using ADIRUs. If GPS does not agree with the three IRUs, the GPS data is thrown out. If the GPS is within tolerance, correction is applied. You could build up very small errors over a long distance, but you should still be pretty close to the airfield when you get there.
Ignore my ignorance. Are you saying the aircrafts track where they are going by calculating their position from gyroscope data? And this is more precise than GPS?
That's like using the accelaration sensors in your phone to navigate. Or sailing with compass and nautical maps.
Possible. Tech isn't even that novel. But still impressive.
- Yes. Most of commercial navigation systems rely on the IRUs as a primary source of position data, and they'll usually have 3 of them. VHF is used by the crew to confirm that the aircraft is on track by referencing VOR stations, though these are slowly being phased out due to GPS.
  That being said, a single traditional IRU can have up to 2km of drift over a 2 hr flight (at which point it's removed from service and replaced). When used in combination with two other IRUs, the error is dramatically reduced. Traditional IRUs are gyroscopically mechanical in nature and do not talk to GPS.
  Now, that being said, the new standard is called an ADIRU (ADvanced IRU), which ties in with GPS and features laser gyros. They're extremely accurate and have essentially zero drift, plus multiple redundant components within each unit.
- The missile knows where it is by knowing where it is not.
Well the article says it caused at least one plane to almost fly into Iran's restricted airspace....
I’m glad I wasn’t the only one scratching my head at why was this an issue….(30 + years in aircraft maintenance just not avionics trade, airframes and engines)

We need a backup for GPS. LORAN should never have been shut down.

I can't see how omega and similar were not just as susceptible to this type of attack. Active outside in positioning almost always has this vulnerability.
There are 3 of them. Galileo, Glonass and Beidou

Yet another reason to avoid the middle east

I've got an idea, how bout stop using the same technology from 20 years ago?

Huh what do you propose then, go back to the 1960s and ensure they are only using VOR and DME ground equipment. There isn't a check sum to check on GPS/GNSS it just a bunch of satellites broadcasting what they think is the correct time. If you jam those and replace them with signals close enough but wrong values you can trick the math that's used inside the GPS/GNSS receiver that computes the the position (and velocity), and it looks like this signal can be introduced slow enough to trick the receiver in real-world applications. One trick to protect yourself is to ensure the signals you receive are from the direction you expect but we aren't going to attach directional antennas on every face of a civilian aircraft, to ensure the strongest signal is from the top of the plane and not the bottom. Essentially civil navigation equipment isn't supposed to be messed with and if it is authorities are supposed to go over and arrest and fine the idiots doing things over the radio they shouldnt. When the bad guy is a government well yea I guess that plan doesn't work and governing bodies such as ICAO should impose penalties like no commerical aircraft from companies from those countries are not allowed elsewhere.
- That's one way to do it.
  Or avionics companies could sell modern equipment that uses multiple constellations (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo), is capable of acquiring more satellites at a time than a 20 year old system, and has basic jamming protection like ignoring spurious signals. You know: like consumer devices have been doing for years.
  Then the commercial operators could install them in their aircraft.
- Something that sounds like a production flaw to me is how the IRS gets corrupted. Sadly the article did not go too much into detail, but gyroscopes and accelerometers should not be affected by GPS data. Sure, if they do not sync up with current data, error propagation becomes a problem - especially on long flights. But i reckon gradually depreciating data is better than maliciously wrong data.
  The article mentioned, that large plains have 2 GPS receivers. The spooving seems less traditional (sending wrong data with more power), but more sending a lot of incomplete data to confuse the receiver. This should introduce a desynchronization of the two receivers present, and alert the internal systems. Since it is detected, that something went wrong with the GPS, the 3 IRS can calculate the position from recorded data. This is a fallback and accuracy will depreciate. But if the pilot is aware it could still be valuable information. Additionally it is more scalable than air traffic control having to navigate affected planes.

This sounds rather dangerous. GPS was originally opened up to civilian use for the purpose of keeping flights on course, after the disaster of Korean Air Flight 007 straying into Soviet airspace and being shot down back in the 1980s.

I can't understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.

GPS guided drone attacks. Civilian GPS top out at 300 m a second. Anything beyond that is a missile and GPS refuses to work unless you have one of the special government GPS chips without the limiter.
- Would that be relevant for a drone attack? I wouldn't think a drone that isn't operated by a state actor is likely to be moving that fast, and presumably a state actor could build their own chips without a limiter?
- Are you meaning 300 measurements per second? Because civilian gps has an accuracy of ~3 meters. I may be misunderstanding though
Holy shit, that really happened? Just finished watching "For All Mankind" and recognized some events, but had no idea this one was real.
I can't understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.
You don't deal with terrorists, do you?

What about GLONASS, Galilleo, or BDS? Are they all being equally jammed? Why wouldn’t they sync with all of them and use a consensus to determine accuracy? Like having multiple ntp servers.

The latest generations of gnss receivers have spoofing and jamming mitigation and detection features included with the chip, and multi-band rx technology to sync to more constellations simultaneously and do exactly what you're talking about. Before then, the spoofing/jamming detection would likely need a software implementation after the receiver. There are different types of spoofing/jamming, all of which are detected and mitigated in different ways.
I don't know the commercial aircraft industry standards for updating technology, but I wouldn't be surprised if most commercial aircraft don't have what you're talking about.

Do none of the systems, GPS, glonass etc. use encryption or authentication of any form?

The problem is with the way GPS works. Your device gets telemetry from the satellites. A fake signal can screw up the whole system.
- But if they had authentication you would know that the message doesn't come from a legitimate satélite.
Yes Galileo supports encryption. But as far as I know it's not in use. Has been trialled only. But I know all Airbus aircraft only support GPS satellites and nothing else (yet). I assume Boeing, being American would be the same then.
As far as solutions go, an aircraft can navigate fine without GPS. It can update its position from ground navigation aids and if they are not available it can still Dead Reckon very well. The navigation error very slowly grows until it's out of the black spot and can use GPS or navigation aid to increase its accuracy. But this navigation error on the time frame of say an hour is a matter of kilometers at most, not dozens.
Nope. And more importantly, it looks like nobody considered what might happen if the signal gets spoofed. The backup systems that are supposed to keep working if GPS breaks also break due to these spoofed signals.
- GPS is encrypted, it's just that the US military won't share the encryption keys so the rest of us have to use the unencrypted channels. They've clearly thought about it and decided against making it public.
GPS is old, the amount of data you get from the satellite is small, essentially satellite id and timestamp. If we would redesign this today, you could include a digital signature.
Sure, but... you can google this to verify ... one can probably manipulate GPS by introducing delay, i.e. resend data from a sat that was hear some seconds ago. With this signal the location will be off.
- But that would also mean the timestamp to be off. Just resending them would also require extremely precise timing if you want to simulate a position that is not anywhere but just a bit off the last position. Making a GPS position jumping around half the world is (comparably) easy, pushing it off for a few kilometers is much, much harder.

I generally don't believe in an isolationist American policy except for Israel. They always drag us into stupid shit like this.

Easy solution: homing rockets that seek out the strongest signal using that band. Whitelist the sources that are official and proper.

GPS is passive so the rockets won't go for the plane... it'll go for the transmission tower.

Use less destructive devices if you'd rather risk sending humans to do the job.

It's called a HARM, Homing Anti Radiation Missile.

boosting the stereotype

Nobody knows what to do?

How they did between 1890 and 1980? Maybe with paper maps and their eyes? It needs investigating!

I don't know from 1903 to 1980 but from 1890 to 1903 they did not fly at all. The first "modern" flight happened in December 1903.
- Clément Ader ?
They winged it