Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.
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.
GPS relies on timing - very precise timing - and signed signals. It might be that GPS units ignore that the signal should be signed, but the (picosecond) timing basically defines an objects’ position in space. A picosecond makes a difference of a few centimeters.
Now, modern planes don’t primarily rely on GPS. They have gyroscopes. But as gyroscopes lose precision over the duration of the flight, they cross-reference with GPS to fix this loss of precision. But for that, the measured GPS location must be close enough to the gyroscope-based location, or the GPS result is discarded as erroneous. So one needs not only to spoof any GPS signal, it must be close enough to the actual position, and then slowly move the target over.
BTW, the villains in the movie “Tomorrow never dies” use a different approach. They influence the GPS satellites directly, which is a totally different thing, and if Iran did attempt that, I think the US would react differently and … more directly.
