GPS Spoofing With $3000 Worth of Equipment and a Laptop

First time accepted submitter svartbjorn writes "Todd Humphreys and a team from the University of Texas proved the concept that a terrorist could take over the navigation of a ship or even a plane, making it appear to the crew that the ship was moving along a straight line course when in fact it was changing course under the control of the device. This raises some serious issues for this being used for terrorist purposes."

Gyros

[BetterSense]

This is why ships still have gyros. GPS is too handy not to use, but I'm pretty sure most large oceangoing vessels also have navigation gyros. The question then is, what happens when GPS gets spoofed...does the system/crew assume the GPS is broken or the gyro broken?

Iran already did this

[Anonymous Coward]

They already did this trick to snag an american drone. Old news.

Which signal?

[KDN]

What they don't say is whether he is spoofing the CA signal, which is publically known and documented, the P signal, which is encrypted, and best I can recall, is not publically known, or the WAIS signal, which I have no bleeping idea.

It's news worthy but isn't at the same time ...

[oztiks]

To say that I didn't know this was possible until now would be far from the truth.

As an avid Air Crash Investigation [natgeotv.com.au] fan, both my wife and myself watch this show on a regular basis. I surmised this was possible a number of years ago. I also thought the concept of spoofing transponders on Cars when we eventually started adapting this technology to Cars was also going to pose similar issues as well and funnily enough it was something that did make the news (don't remember the article now but it did make Slashdot) but was done so to trump autonomous driving, for whatever political agenda.

In all honesty, there is NO WAY to step around this problem unless you get rid of autonomous driving/piloting all together. Because of some simple facts

a) You can't tokenise any form of communication because it then deems the process unreliable
b) You can't encrypt it for the same reason
c) You can't in anyway make it COMPLICATED again for the same reason
d) You can't get rid of it because it makes flying unsafe.
e) It's a security hole that cannot be patched, fixed or resolved. Period.

Also the fact that this is a pretty common and is a widespread issue, which only really just made POC now is an absolute joke.