Recently I’ve spotted some podcast
about GPS signal security.
I’ve never been thinking more
deeply about the topic so it got my attention.
It turns out that the GPS
signal is very prone to jamming or spoofing.
The signal is very week so
even a small sized transmitter is capable of jamming or spoofing it over the
distance of few square kilometres.
Within that area all devices relying
on the GPS signal would get confused (jamming) or might start reacting to the
forged (spoofed) signal.
That is a serious threat especially
to marine vessels. They quite heavily rely upon the GPS infrastructure.
It seems that GPS jammers are
quite popular in UK.
I believe that I did not meet
the GPS jamming device operating in Warsaw so far.
Do you think you might have
met one?
Some additional materials:
Very interesting article. I didn't know anything about jamming and spoofing GPS signal before so i read all this article which you added here.
ReplyDeleteLater, I searched on internet something more about this and I found even Polish shop with portable devices to spoofing GPS signal (BTW the price is not too high because only 400 euro what makes these devices generally available to many people).
Personally I travel by plane and boat so I am not happy to hear this but everyone knows that there is nothing that can not be cracked (so it had to happen even here).
Many thanks for this news Waldemar, nice to know.
I believe that travelling by planes is safe. Aviation industry does have it's own systems that are more secure and redundant.
DeleteBoats are different - there the GPS adoption caused displacement of other global positioning systems.
There is some information about jamming on the official site for GPS:
Deletehttp://www.gps.gov/spectrum/jamming/
Looks like they are focusing their efforts on prevention, penalties and legal barriers not technical solutions.
When I finish reading that articles I start wondering about how dangerous it can bee.
ReplyDeleteImagine that someone start to use jamming or spoffing GPS in bad way what can happen. For example airplanes use GPS military plains or drones use GPS military rocket use GPS like you can see it can be quiet dangerous thing.
When I read that article I recall some experiment which was done by some hacker who use computer to take remote control on the car. These tow things show how technology in bad hands can be dangerous for use .
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DeleteI'd like to believe that the military have their own navigational solutions that are less susceptible to such attempts. The article does mention spoofing drone GPS, but I'm pretty sure the real high-end stuff isn't available for public testing at universities. I doubt there's a risk of a drone bombing my house because GPS claimed it was a terrorist hideout. Not unless there's a real war and it becomes a part of information warfare.
DeleteOn the other hand, civilian GPS devices being vulnerable to such exploits is bad enough. There is an enormous potential for abuse of such technology. Some of it might be harmless or even "beneficial", like preventing of cell phone tracking. Disrupting the navigational system of a plane, though, is a potential disaster, with hundreds of people risking their lives. Of course, it's not something an ordinary person is capable of doing, but for sufficiently determined individual, the option is there.
It's a good thing this is relatively new and that the average person doesn't rely on GPS *that* much, but next few years may have pretty interesting - and potentially dangerous - developments.
For sure military have their own GPS but as you well know it is possible that some good hacker will hack it. In the past many times hackers broke in to some government site in USA :)
DeleteI have a thoght that probably has not been mentioned in the materials.
DeleteGPS is a week signal prone to be outshouted but most of the "smart-phone" devices use AGPS (A stands for Assisted). It means that the device uses the combined positioning information not only from the GPS system but also from the GSM signal (BTS triangulation).
I think it increases the overall security.
There are actually two GPS signals that are spread from satellites, one is for public use seckond one is for military. Only US and NATO military can use the second one. The public one is coded in what is called C/A code and military is coded in P code. As far as I remember, P code key is very long (even transmition of this code takes few seckonds) and is changed regularly (I think every week or so). Like every signal it is susceptible to jamming but not to spoofing. Propobly it will never be spoofed becouse most people do not have access to this technology. Public coding signal is well known so it's not that hard to spoof. But still each GPS reciever can see at once up to 12 satellites on the sky, so having one "spoofing satellite" would not do any harm since the signal is well filtered. So personally I don't believe that it is so easilly accomplished.
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ReplyDeleteAny signal is susceptible to jamming, so I don't see what can be done about that other than detecting when it happens and switching to a navigation mode that doesn't rely on GPS.
ReplyDeleteThe answer to spoofing is encryption, which I would have thought is already being used by the military (but maybe not?). Then only those devices which have access to a key can understand the signal. The military can manage the secrecy of handling encryption keys. The problem is consumer devices.
Consumer GPS devices would be harder to secure, especially without two-way communication between GPS transmitters and receivers. Maybe cellular networks can help here as Waldemar suggested.
This makes the future of driverless cars, which currently rely heavily on accurate GPS signals, much less certain. I wonder if Google is working on it?
I have just thought whether encryption may be a way for securing a GPS signal against spoofing :-).
DeleteBoth GPS signalls are encrypted and it's not that easy to spoof them. Acctually I'm quite suprised that it is possible.
DeleteWiktor - consumer GPS are also recieving encrypted signal, so it can not get much better than that. Transmitters and recievers - as you wrote - do not communicate both ways! There is no two-way communication. Satellite just spreads its own message and our GPS recievers gather that signal.
I think it's a very serious security issue. Fox News even call it terrorism (source). I'm sure that military have this problem solved but accidents like Costa Concordia disaster shows that GPS is not only one weak part of the system.
ReplyDeleteI didn't hear about hacking or spoofing the GPS signal before. Although the idea seems to be fairly simple and effective for the devices that we use commonly, I highly doubt that it can be done with the devices used by the military or some other business like the airplane industry. So I will still feel quite safe while traveling by plane :) In addition to this, I think that the military uses more sophisticated technology where systems security is one of the primary concerns for the designers. Due to that I think that they have addressed such problems quite some time ago, but as military is not too eager to share their discoveries with the public we are just not aware of them.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I cannot think of even one positive area in which altering the GPS signal can be used. So probably this is just a security threat that needs to be dealt with. Probably some kind of a two-way handshake between the sender and receiver would suffice, but I'm not an expert in this area of knowledge.
I've never thought about security of GPS system - similarly to others. I also hope that I've never been a victim of described devices.
ReplyDeleteAdditionally answers given by people like Waldemar, Kamil or Wiktor have just shown me that I probably don't have to be afraid about security both GPS system and other system which I normally use because somebody else probably thought about it earlier.
I've heard about jamming and spoofing of GPS signal few years ago and I believe that common users are rarely a target.
ReplyDeleteOf course military and airplane services have some security protections but everything can be hacked so we will never be 100% safe but there is always some kind of risk.
Jamming of GPS signal (like any other signal) is easy and is not a surprise to me. But spoofing of GPS signal sounds to me like very unlikely to me. This signal is very well encrypted but acctually since our recievers have a decryption mechanism maybe someone managed to revers engineer those encryption method and is able to send forged signal.
ReplyDeleteWe don't have to worry about spoofing military GPS signals becouse access to this technology is very limited - only to NATO military.
BTW do you know that GPS is not only used to help us find our position in space. GPS satellites are also equipped in earthquke sensors which purpose is to monitor underground nuclear detonation. Gathered information is available only to NAVSTAR (creator of GPS) and of course to US military.
It seems to me strange that GPS signal is well encrypted (I think about GPS signal for civilian purposes). I don't see any causes for doing it.
DeleteWhile I was trying to confirm your information (without any success :-() I found that military can use GPS signal for transmitting encoded messages. So I see another cause for jamming this signal on a battle field.
As you've mentioned that only NAVSTAR (+US Army) has access to the earthquake sensors data - it reminded me another thing concerning GPS security.
DeleteBecause of the fact that GPS is under control of USA other GPS-like systems emerged. Other countries were not interested in becoming dependent upon US controlled system. That is why systems like GLONASS (Russia) or GNSS Galileo (European Union) or IRNSS (India) were built.
I do not know if they operate in exactly same way as GPS but the fact that there is more than one improves the overall reliability and security I think.
The signal from the GPS satellites is weak, so it is easy to disrupt. Just give the frequencies 1450 - 1600 MHzm to effectively disrupt the signal in the area of several kilometers.
ReplyDeleteIt is easy to buy a transmitter to signal jamming. What are people doing? Appear on the market in price from $ 5. They have a range of up to 25 km. According to the BBC for £ 100 you can buy a transmitter that interfere with the of tens of kilometers.
Most of the transmitters used by car thieves, and employees of the transport network.
Introduction transmitters error is another drawback GPS. Reported data from the wrong location.
You can encode a signal through encryption. You can also change the transmission channel but it also can interfere.
People jam the GPS signal in order to strengthen its signal. Often the signal is intercepted by a human target acquisition by the signal.
The military has its own technology. The customer may not under shop to buy such technology. They are available for all are strictly confidential and protected. A private person may not use these technologies. Often military technologies disrupt technologies available on the market for everyone.
People are tracked using phone GPS signals. Privacy through the use of these technologies is very small.
I agree with Wiktor s2483 :) "The answer to spoofing is encryption..." only authorized devices will have access to GPS. Also if GPS singal is stronger the possibility of jamming would be reduced.
ReplyDeleteI think there is another interesting GPS feature however not very well known. The American systems controlling and programing the GPS are providing false signal on purpose in some places on the globe. That means we are getting false data in some areas without anyone spoofing the signal. This is apparently done for security reasons. Ha ha :)