College Students Hijack $80 Million Yacht With GPS Signal Spoofing

colinneagle writes "A team of students at the University of Texas at Austin built and successfully tested a custom GPS spoofing device to remotely redirect an $80 million yacht onto a different route. The project was completed with the permission of the yacht's owners in the Mediterranean Sea this past June. Because the yacht's crew relies entirely on GPS signal for direction, the students were able to lead the yacht onto a different course without the knowledge of anyone on-board. The GPS spoofing device essentially over-powered all other GPS signals using until the spoofed signal was the only one that the yacht followed. The team then used the GPS spoofing device to convince the ship's crew to redirect onto a different route voluntarily. By changing the signal on the spoofing device, the students led the crew to believe that the ship was drifting off-course to the left. In response, the crew steered the ship to the right, thinking that it would get the ship back on course, when it actually brought the ship off the course entirely."

Dupe

[phizi0n]

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/26/2344215/gps-spoofing-with-3000-worth-of-equipment-and-a-laptop [slashdot.org]

Re:No...

[maliqua]

sure you can they clearly state the crew was unaware that its course was being altered by them, by that logic no controlled experiment can ever be considered a success

also this is a re-post from last week c'mon /. pay attention

Re:Dupe

[Lumpy]

It is taking advantage of a poor GPS antenna design. IF the GPS antenna was shielded from ground signals (it would also create a smaller circle of sky to see, but that is not a problem with the number of birds up there) this spoof would have failed unless they were in an aircraft above the yacht.

Re:Dupe

[tlhIngan]

It may be a dupe, but I distinctly remember reading post after post on that article from apparently knowledgeable people explaining in great detail how this whole "GPS spoofing" thing was supposedly nearly impossible or at least highly impractical. I am very much interested in having someone explain how these people have managed to accomplish something that is supposedly not doable.

Seems to me this represents a valid threat to the safety of using civil GPS navigation systems, on land or at sea. Most of the posts on the previous article seemed to indicate that GPS is NOT threatened at all. I am unable to rectify these two opposing points of view without further input from knowledgeable people.

Except well, you have to override the receiver of all satellites it can see. Like here, they had to overpower the GPS satellites (it's not hard), but they also had to maintain the lock.

It's a lot more difficult If you want to misdirect a whole fleet of vehicles because the satellite signal has to follow everyone and in a sensible fashion. If you really wanted to take down GPS, it's far easier to just do a blanket jamming of it than to try to follow each and every vehicle you want to misdirect and aim the antenna at them.

GPS works by sending a timing pulse from the satellite to the ground - the receiver gets 3 or 4 of these timing pulses, correlates them to figure out how far each satellite is and then uses the spheres to find its location. Each receiver should generally come to a unique solution for position (because well, no two objects can occupy the same space).

If you broadcast this fake signal out, eventually someone will notice when their GPS suddenly gets a fix hundreds of meters away from them (each unit gets a slightly different signal from the satellite - when they all get the same signal, they all show the same location,). So it works great if you're in a fleet of trucks following some route, but if you're a bit further spaced out, the solution doesn't work so well and each will need its own antenna and transmitter to come up with plausible location information.

And that's the problem - it doesn't scale. The technique works if you want to misdirect a ship, a drone, a plane, or whatever, but to misdirect multiple requires multiple transmitters in order to send plausible yet fake data to each individual unit. It still is far easier to simply broadcast garbage on the GPS band so no GPS receiver can get a lock.