That's cool! Reminds me of the way the Iranian most likely got control over a US drone a couple of years back.<p>They jammed communication signals and faked GPS data when automatic "go back to home base" landing procedure kicked in.<p><a href="http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/iran-hacked-gps-signals-to-capture-us-dr/232300666" rel="nofollow">http://www.informationweek.com/security/attacks/iran-hacked-...</a>
Yeah if they just used their paper charts, logged the position and compared GPS with the dead reckoning (or depth lines, radar shore returns,..) the attackers would have a much harder time... My sailing instructor always stressed that GPS is unreliable and especially when close to danger one should cross check what it says with other methods. Came in handy when my plotter failed.
Click bait title(same as the article, for what its worth). $80mil yacht uses same GPS as a $80 sell phone, the 6 zeros dont change that.<p>To the actual issue, i wonder how practical this is? In that i mean what level of power output is required to override the correct signal and at what distance? Is this something that could be a real issue, impractical? What?
So a $80 million yatch can't afford an $3000 high quality gyroscope?<p>Now you could buy amazing laser gyroscopes, for planes the Inertial navigation system error could be great, but for ships(that move more than 20X slower) is not.
Seems like an experiment contrived to take a trip to the Mediterranean. I can see this being a good bachelors experiment, but if its grad student work, it seems pretty obvious that if you set up a fake GPS satellite, it will skew the coordinates on someones GPS device.
As mentioned in the paper, a simple solution if there is internet connectivity is to verify that the ephemeris is correct. This is how assisted GPS works in mobile phones and the like anyway (the ephemeris and almanac data are downloaded over the network to increase acquisition times).
Sounds like the plot to this 1997 Bond movie. <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_never_dies" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomorrow_never_dies</a>
I wonder how this compares with previous 'pseudolite' ideas? The University of New South Wales (et al.) were active here but I think the point was more an augemtation to provide better positioning at GPS-unfriendly latitudes or topographies.<p>These ran into all sorts of problems, largely to do with the proximity of the pseudolites to the receivers such as synchronisation and signal strength issues. Locatanets (<a href="http://locata.com/" rel="nofollow">http://locata.com/</a>) are the in thing nowadays.
Do GPS signals not correlate themselves with a compass reading? I would think that comparing the change in coordinates to the external fact would prevent spoofing.
I discussed this with my friend yesterday and wondered about key management with the military GPS channels. Is there a single key that, if extracted* from just one military GPS receiver, could spoof all military signals? Or are there multiple keys, possibly with a revocation scheme? GPS is getting old, what was the state of the art key management back then?<p>* I'm sure the anti-tamper technology is pretty great.
The economist is today covering GPS outages near the London Stock Exchange. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6123535" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6123535</a><p>Perhaps interference happens a lot more often that we think.
The lab's website has some interesting information. Looks like they are researching ways to add integrity to the civilian signals.<p><a href="http://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/" rel="nofollow">http://radionavlab.ae.utexas.edu/</a>
I am seeing this more and more. I've seen the ability to have a phone take over an airplane, a laptop control a car, now a laptop taking over a ship... where are all the security guys at when this stuff is implemented?