Work Proceeds on Mitigation Strategies for Global Navigation Satellite System Jamming/Spoofing (eetimes.com) 29
Long-time Slashdot reader DesertNomad summarizes a report from EE Times:
It's been known for a long time that the various Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) systems are easily jammed; the more "interesting" problem is the potential to spoof a GNSS signal and by spoofing use that to cause GNSS receivers to determine incorrect positions. The challenge lies in the observation that the navigation messages can be constructed by bad actors on the ground. Work going on for several years now has been to provide crypto signatures that have the potential to authenticate valid transmissions. Current commercial receivers can't take advantage of that, so there may be industry-wide needs to update the receiver devices.
"The vulnerability of the global positioning system, or GPS, is widely acknowledged..." reports EE Times: Spoofing creates all kinds of havoc. For example, it can be used to hijack autonomous vehicles and send them on alternate routes. Spoofing can alter the routes recorded by vehicle monitors, or break geofences used to guard operational areas. It also poses a risk to critical infrastructure, including power, telecommunication and transportation systems. Jan van Hees, business development and marketing director for GNSS receiver maker Septentrio, provided these analogies: "Jamming involves making so much noise that the [satellite signal] disappears. Spoofing is like a phishing attack on the signal."
The U.S. Coast Guard has recently tracked a growing number of high-profile incidents involving GPS interference. For example, the loss of GPS reception in Israeli ports in 2019 left GPS-guided autonomous cranes inoperable, collateral damage from the Syrian civil war. In 2016, more than 20 ships off the Crimean peninsula were thought to be the victim of a GPS spoofing attack which shifted the ships' positions on electronic chart displays to land.
The article recommends real-world auditing, testing, and risk assessment, adding that one pending fix is signal encryption "including a framework called open service navigation message authentication (OSNMA)." The OSNMA anti-spoofing service developed for the European GNSS system, enables secure transmissions from Galileo satellites to encryption-enabled GNSS receivers. In the midst of final testing, OSNMA will soon be available free to users... A secret key on the satellite is used to generate a digital signature. Both the signature and key are appended to navigation data and transmitted to the receiver. OSNMA is designed to be backward-compatible, so that positioning without OSNMA still works.
"The vulnerability of the global positioning system, or GPS, is widely acknowledged..." reports EE Times: Spoofing creates all kinds of havoc. For example, it can be used to hijack autonomous vehicles and send them on alternate routes. Spoofing can alter the routes recorded by vehicle monitors, or break geofences used to guard operational areas. It also poses a risk to critical infrastructure, including power, telecommunication and transportation systems. Jan van Hees, business development and marketing director for GNSS receiver maker Septentrio, provided these analogies: "Jamming involves making so much noise that the [satellite signal] disappears. Spoofing is like a phishing attack on the signal."
The U.S. Coast Guard has recently tracked a growing number of high-profile incidents involving GPS interference. For example, the loss of GPS reception in Israeli ports in 2019 left GPS-guided autonomous cranes inoperable, collateral damage from the Syrian civil war. In 2016, more than 20 ships off the Crimean peninsula were thought to be the victim of a GPS spoofing attack which shifted the ships' positions on electronic chart displays to land.
The article recommends real-world auditing, testing, and risk assessment, adding that one pending fix is signal encryption "including a framework called open service navigation message authentication (OSNMA)." The OSNMA anti-spoofing service developed for the European GNSS system, enables secure transmissions from Galileo satellites to encryption-enabled GNSS receivers. In the midst of final testing, OSNMA will soon be available free to users... A secret key on the satellite is used to generate a digital signature. Both the signature and key are appended to navigation data and transmitted to the receiver. OSNMA is designed to be backward-compatible, so that positioning without OSNMA still works.
Re:Mitigation? Like a compass? (Score:4, Insightful)
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The problem is that human elements are less and less desired, now. the self-driving trucks craze is the biggest sign of it. Imagine an armada of trucks that doesnt have to rest for 1/3 of the day. Sounds amazing for all the penny-pinching logisticians of the world who would love nothing more than to get rid of their pesky drivers.
Would be a real shame if someone told these new trucks that the road goes straight into the gas station...
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It's almost certainly sarcasm. What's especially telling is the bit about cloud cover - it's just not possible. Typically navigation is done using a combination of a sextant, a compass, a watch, navigational charts, and a decent knowledge of trigonometry if GPS isn't available for whatever reason, and the sextant is useless if you can't see any celestial objects.
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Maps? Compass? The stars?
The stars aren't going to keep your car in its lane.
Remember when ship captains and the navy could get around the world with just those?
No, but I had fun diving on plenty of shipwrecks.
Anti-spoof. (Score:2)
And what about the other GPS systems?
RTFA (Score:2)
Those and parallel U.S. efforts have prompted efforts to boost the resilience of GNSS systems.
So both US and European systems are working to enhance their satnav constellations. Frankly, I don't care what Russia and China do with theirs.
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Frankly, I don't care what Russia and China do with theirs.
It's best if they keep it running smoothly, could make a handy backup. It's always better to have more than one system.
Re:RTFA (Score:4, Insightful)
Most cell phones and modern receivers pick up multiple GPS constellations, including Beidou and Glonass. If you combine all of them together that should mitigate some of the spoofing and jamming issues. Although I suspect they all operate in a close enough frequency band that jamming would easily knock out all of them at once. I've heard reports that with satellites from these four constellations, you can get a fix that's as accurate as WAAS without any SBAS. Not sure if that's true or not. Personally I think it's kind of neat that I am seeing up to 16 satellites at any one time on my GPS equipment.
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GPS appears to have completed updates last August. https://www.militaryaerospace.... [militaryaerospace.com]
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Time to bring LORAN back..
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LORAN has too many limitations, including the fact that it needs a large amount of ground stations to operate. It is great over the oceans where its use of the HF bands means it can run for hundreds of miles, but less so inland. And the need for many stations means the system gets impacted if transmitters get turned off.
So navigating an ICBM using LORAN isn't terribly useful since the target could turn off their transmitters thus confusing the missile. And being on HF means night
This one's free (Score:1)
For most countries in the world the answer is... (Score:2)
... Use all that are available to you and do a majority rule.
That is, put in there GPS, Galileo, Glonass, BeiDo, the one from england (when ready), and the regional ones (Japan's QZSS and India's IRNSS) if you are close enough for those to be relevant, and do a majority rule (plus averaging) on them to find your location.
Spuffing one is easy, but 3 at the same time, may be a challenge...
Of course, if you are one of the 27 euro countries, or the USoA, or Russia, or China, or a few other countries, this may n
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Thomas Guide (Score:3, Informative)
I used to buy them every couple years.
(Excellent maps and NOT complicated for the average person, really.)
Don't complain that it only covers maybe one state, if the war comes and the SHTF then when the zombies are closing in I DO NOT CARE about directions to Jersey, I only need to know how to get from where I am to a place outside of what I think is the danger zone, and know what detours may be available.
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GNSS (Score:1)
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A spoofed transmission with the wrong key would appear as uncorrelated broadband noise to a receiver with the correct key. At the same time, the anti-spoofing process prevented unauthorised use of the signal, as a receiver without the key would receive nothing but noise. This functionality was only enabled for the "precise" (typically reserved for military and government in
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It's a helluva lot more work to put that in than just to broadcast a time signal, and the key management is, like all key management, a nightmare.
Speaking of crypto, the summary in the article is pretty garbled, written by someone who doesn't seem to understand public-key crypto. GPS NMA standard public-key crypto with a weird key size, NIST P-224. Galileo NMA uses the TESLA broadcast authentication protocol, which is a pretty complex and heavyweight protocol to run over GPS messages. You can immediatel
Bond villains already did this (Score:1)
https://youtu.be/i02gyEu6uA4 [youtu.be]