GPS Jammers Are Being Used to Hijack Trucks and Down Drones (zdnet.com) 83
The world's freight-carrying trucks and ships use GPS-based satellite tracking and navigation systems, reports ZDNet. But "Criminals are turning to cheap GPS jamming devices to ransack the cargo on roads and at sea, a problem that's getting worse...."
Jammers work by overpowering GPS signals by emitting a signal at the same frequency, just a bit more powerful than the original. The typical jammers used for cargo hijackings are able to jam frequencies from up to 5 miles away rendering GPS tracking and security apparatuses, such as those used by trucking syndicates, totally useless. In Mexico, jammers are used in some 85% of cargo truck thefts. Statistics are harder to come by in the United States, but there can be little doubt the devices are prevalent and widely used. Russia is currently availing itself of the technology to jam commercial planes in Ukraine.
As we've covered, the proliferating commercial drone sector is also prey to attack.... During a light show in Hong Kong in 2018, a jamming device caused 46 drones to fall out of the sky, raising public awareness of the issue.
While the problem is getting worse, the article also notes that companies are developing anti-jamming solutions for drone receivers, "providing protection and increasing the resiliency of GPS devices against jamming attacks.
"By identifying and preventing instances of jamming, fleet operators are able to prevent cargo theft."
As we've covered, the proliferating commercial drone sector is also prey to attack.... During a light show in Hong Kong in 2018, a jamming device caused 46 drones to fall out of the sky, raising public awareness of the issue.
While the problem is getting worse, the article also notes that companies are developing anti-jamming solutions for drone receivers, "providing protection and increasing the resiliency of GPS devices against jamming attacks.
"By identifying and preventing instances of jamming, fleet operators are able to prevent cargo theft."
No surprise at all (Score:5, Informative)
Military signals (sent from the same birds, but with a much longer PN code) may be more resistant, but still - a 1 watt transmitter in the vicinity of a GPS receiver is many thousands (if not millions) times stronger than the signals arriving from the satellites.
Re:No surprise at all (Score:5, Insightful)
Could we not build an inexpensive missile that homes and the jamming signal and destroys it? It could be provided to LEO and also kept on board commercial ships and trucks. It need not have high exploves, it could be kinetic to minimize collateral damage.
Yes, someone could do that but that is a very bad idea.
I recall reading a story about complaints of someone interfering with the frequency used by emergency locator beacons. The signal was strong enough to make it difficult to pick up beacons from satellites but weak and intermittent so it was difficult to locate. After considerable time and effort was put in to tracking down the source it was finally located. It was an old refrigerator with a worn out motor. The refrigerator worked well enough still that the owners didn't think to replace it, and were oblivious to the interference this caused since it didn't cross their minds that a refrigerator could be producing any RF.
If we can track down RF interference to such precision that we could launch projectiles to destroy it then we can have law enforcement go knock on doors and ask nicely they stop first. If asking nicely doesn't make it stop then maybe we could consider launching projectiles at it.
We have anti-radiation missiles that are just crazy accurate, but they don't come cheap. There's a video floating about the internet of an anti-radar missile hitting a large radar dish on a ship's mast just inches from center, plowing through the dish, and then detonating a feet feet behind the dish. The expected result was the missile would fly about 100 feet over the ship and then detonate to launch shrapnel down on the ship and that would damage the antenna.
There is a case of a HARM anti-radar missile being launched at a target but hitting a house instead. Maybe the house had an old refrigerator running inside.
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Where I work, every year when they turned the A/C on, the bit error rate on one of the satellite downlinks would blow up about three orders of magnitude. The fix was to change out the brushes on the compressor motors on the roof.
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There is a case of a HARM anti-radar missile being launched at a target but hitting a house instead. Maybe the house had an old refrigerator running inside.
Or maybe the HARM was following the GPS signal that was being jammed... ;-P
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Or maybe the HARM was following the GPS signal that was being jammed... ;-P
HARM stands for "high-speed anti-radiation missile". A missile that follows a GPS track is a cruise missile. There's no GPS receiver in an anti-radiation missile by definition.
I realize this is a snarky remark in reply to a snarky remark but someone could not know this and believe a GPS jammer could confuse an anti-radiation missile. Anti-radiation missiles are the kind of weapons used to destroy GPS jammers, these missiles home in on radio transmitters then blow up when in close proximity. Sometimes th
Re:No surprise at all (Score:5, Informative)
All the satellites on a given frequency transmit at about the same power for (co-channel) compatibility reasons -- they don't want to jam each other.
A typical received signal strength for a GNSS signal is on the order of -155 dBW (decibels relative to one Watt), so it's not the 3 or 6 orders of magnitude difference that you suggest: it's 15 orders of magnitude lower power than that one-watt transmitter, a difference of one quadrillion times.
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Sometimes people do not want to be tracked (Score:2)
The good thing about this, is that the military will get free technical solutions that will make GPS jammers less usable.
Re:Sometimes people do not want to be tracked (Score:5, Insightful)
You do realize GPS satellites cannot track you right? Your phone/device uses the clock signals from multiple GPS satellites to calculate approximately where you are. Jamming just prevents reception of these signals.
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True, the problem lies with your employers phone/tablet/vehicle/clothing/whatever you are compelled to have with you using the clock signals from multiple GPS satellites to calculate approximately where you are.
Jamming would prevent reception of these signals when you are not being paid to work.
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You do realize GPS satellites cannot track you right? Your phone/device uses the clock signals from multiple GPS satellites to calculate approximately where you are. Jamming just prevents reception of these signals.
You do realize that was an irrelevant answer right? Your network provider can track your location with DTOA but nobody else can, so preventing GPS from working prevents anyone but your carrier (or the government, by extension) from using your device to track you.
This is Slashdot, we know how GPS works, you didn't tell anyone anything they didn't already know. You're the one who doesn't understand the security implications.
Re:Sometimes people do not want to be tracked (Score:5, Insightful)
I would use one to disable me being tracked.(and that should not be illegal)
One could argue that tracking is a privacy issue. However, tracking via GPS requires a receiver, so the presence of the receiver and its ability to reveal your location is the real problem, not that the receiver happens to use GPS.
GPS jammers don't have the ability to jam just a single receiver. The involuntary jamming of the GPS receivers for everyone else in your proximity is what is illegal.
Re:Sometimes people do not want to be tracked (Score:5, Informative)
I would use one to disable me being tracked.(and that should not be illegal)
GPS is a one-way signal. The satellites don't receive any information from the receivers.
If you mean jamming the device you are carrying, a far simpler way to avoid being tracked is to tap on "Settings" and disable "Location Services".
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One can presumably surround the device by a Faraday cage and not interfere with other people using GPS nearby. There may be unfortunate consequences, though, if doing so violates a contract one agreed to.
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At a minimum you are probably getting almanac and ephemerides data from aGPS; and (as one can tell from how persistently phones bug you
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Re:Sometimes people do not want to be tracked (Score:5, Interesting)
Those towers that carry the call have a pretty good idea exactly where you are.
They do. But they don't use GPS.
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I mean, they don't use GPS for location tracking. But they do use GPS for setting their clocks to enable time division on the spectrum (taking turns in a very synchronized way).
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So? If you're being tracked, what does it matter how you're being tracked exactly? Back when the first iPhone came out... that one didn't have GPS if you'll recall... cell-tower triangulation was good enough for a location precision of about 100 meters or so if you were stationary. And if you were moving, it got even better. But even 100m is more than good enough to find you on the roads if they know what kind of car you're driving. And that was a good decade and a half ago. Presumably the march of pr
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For that to work, you need a phone that interprets "disable location services" as "turn it off", and not "stop telling me that it's on"
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For that to work, you need a phone that interprets "disable location services" as "turn it off", and not "stop telling me that it's on"
Which phone does that?
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All of them, unless proven otherwise. Now try and prove it.
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That's not really relevant to what's going on here. The article does not explain how GPS blocking facilitates cargo theft. Here is the connection [defenseadvancement.com]:
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Especially if a single navigation system travels a route repeatedly or you have access to a dataset from multiple systems travelling a given route it should be possible to draw some conclusions about how much of the GPS cons
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I would use one to disable me being tracked. (and that should not be illegal)
The good thing about this, is that the military will get free technical solutions that will make GPS jammers less usable.
Wearing a tin foil hat might be cheeper and more effective. They plant the trackers in your head when you are born. /s
Time for better antennas (Score:2)
Authentication would be nice too, but is only half a solution (can't fix relay attacks) and will like take another decade for civilian GPS. Secure GPS receivers need to be sure signals are actually coming from the direction of the satellites, so phased array antennas.
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Secure GPS receivers need to be sure signals are actually coming from the direction of the satellites, so phased array antennas.
A phased array antenna could help mitigate jamming and make sense for military, automotive, and other safety-critical applications.
But for authentication, a simpler solution would be to sign the location data with a public key.
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A relay attack can still spoof location even with authentication.
Re: Time for better antennas (Score:5, Interesting)
But for authentication, a simpler solution would be to sign the location data with a public key.
Technically, gps satellites donâ(TM)t broadcast location data, they broadcast a highly accurate timing signal and the precise orbital information for the satellites themselves. Your receiver then trilaterates its location based on the known location of the satellites and the distance to each one.
That said, what youâ(TM)re describing is precisely what Military GPS does. The cryptographic material allows the receiver to authenticate the received signal, and also unlocks the signals transmitted on the other frequencies. (This also allows them to factor out atmospheric propagation delays, increasing precision).
It would be relatively difficult to introduce cryptographic signatures on the civilian signal.
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That said, what youâ(TM)re describing is precisely what Military GPS does. The cryptographic material allows the receiver to authenticate the received signal, and also unlocks the signals transmitted on the other frequencies. (This also allows them to factor out atmospheric propagation delays, increasing precision).
The military signal also has higher processing gain, which makes up for the added noise of its wider bandwidth, but also reduces the effect of interfering signals more than the civilian signals; it is more jam resistant.
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Anti-Jamming antennas do exist.
That said, they mostly work by blocking signals from the side, and limiting the view of the sky to something like 20 degrees above the horizon. Unless your jammer or spoofer is really really strong, if you can get enough directionality to the sky (and are at a low enough elevation where this works) you're good to go.
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You can buffer each patch antenna of the phased array and then form multiple independent phase shifted sums with a single array, no need for time multiplexing. This isn't ideal for jamming resistance compared to creating phase shifted sums with PIN diodes directly, but ehh, probably good enough. A concern for a military jet which might have high power ECM focused on it, not so much a truck dealing with an omnidirectional jammer.
Authentication is already being planned (see Chimera) but this isn't enough : ht [arxiv.org]
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It is much easier than that. You can supplement the GPS with the other satellites, along with cellular and terrestrial radio systems. For the specific case of cargo hijacking all you need to add is a accelerometer for inertial navigation.
It is easy to harden the systems if it is a priority. Maybe it is time to bring back LORAN.
All in one unit (Score:2)
Can you get a GPS jammer, cell phone jammer, Wi-Fi jammer and speed radar jammer all in one device?
That would be pretty sweet.
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You can get them. Or do one yourself. Just do not be surprised when your door gets kicked down.
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You can get them. Or do one yourself. Just do not be surprised when your door gets kicked down.
Even in cases of deliberate interference the FCC sends you a letter, and then they send you another letter, and then they have to go to court to get an order for someone to come do something about you. Unless you're interfering with a military operation, the odds of getting your door kicked down for interference are slim.
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Well, you may interfere with a airport (bad) or police radio (worse)...
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The police can't find their ass with both hands, a map, and a digital ass-finding device. The airport is a real concern, though. They have to have employees who know how radio works.
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The police will ask for help finding you, then they will kick your door down and make you pay for that help. Do not make the mistake to think that they have to do this themselves or even need to understand what is going on.
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Well, if I had one, I wouldn't use it at home. Duh!!
Can jammers be detected? (Score:2)
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It's possible, but tends to be time-intensive. It really depends on the nature of the jamming signal: sometimes it's accidental, for example a faulty filter on the output of a nearby transmitter that is allowed. If the interferer is not always transmitting, it can be hard to observe it with surveillance tools. If the interferer is on a moving vehicle, or varies in its transmission behavior, those can further complicate efforts to find it.
This kind of technology is fairly controlled: in the US, export contr
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Re: Can jammers be detected? (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s relatively easy to tell if you are receiving a spoofed signal. All you need is two receivers sufficiently far apart that you can reliably see the distance between the two. When youâ(TM)re being spoofed, that measured distance will drop to zero as the spoofed location will be received by both receivers identically.
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A spoofed signal is just the current time (well, slightly delayed or early to change the perceived location). If receivers are in different places, they will triangulate different positions.
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That's the whole idea behind a HARM missile...
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My understanding is that the 'jamming' is extremely local to the truck. The purpose of the jamming is not to spoof the location or cause the driver to drive off course. The purpose of the jamming is so the trucking company (tracking the truck) doesn't know where the truck is. This allows the truck to be driven somewhere and unloaded. The driver himself may be doing the jamming (if he is in on it), or it could be someone in a car next to the truck (if the truck is being hijacked).
Obviously (Score:2)
Re: Obviously (Score:2)
Itâ(TM)s called an AGM-88 HARM. A little expensive, but gets the job done.
Why the issue? (Score:2)
Hell, China sent videos over the net, of their openly spying on Taiwan, and it appears that they were using DJI drones.
And just as China uses 5G equipment sold to other nations to spy on them, it appears that they are using civilian DJI drones as well.
It is not much different than when Ring got caught sending data to a server in China.
And yes, the west would do this against china which is why China which is w
GPS is easy to jam (Score:2)
The signal's pretty weak, it doesn't take much local noise to overwhelm it, but it's not exactly complicated to have a check-in procedure based on last GPS poll, either.
If a unit's GPS hasn't checked in for five minutes, you call the operator's cell. You did give them a phone, right? You'll have their GPS track to know their route and speed at the time of their last GPS message, and five minutes is NOTHING if you're trying to jam someone's GPS and then hijack them far enough off track that they can't be f
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GPS receivers can be made much harder to jam. With directional antennae, GPS receivers can nullify gain in the direction of jammers and amplify gain in the direction of known GPS satellites. When there are typically many more GPS satellites than required for position and velocity sensing, it would be difficult to place jammers in positions to jam enough signals at once to make a GPS receiver stop working.
There are also GNSS chipsets that receive not only GPS, but also GLONASS, BeiDou, QZSS, and Galileo, and
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When you're going directional, you'd need a separate phased array for each satellite lock. That would certainly work but it would get expensive.
Simple solution: hardwire it (Score:2)
Why not use small dish antennae (Score:2)
If you use small dish antenna, it can look into the sky with 60 degree FOV. This will cover at least 4 GPS satellites but will remove ground based signals. If someone is emitting the signal from sky, it can still jam, but I guess, that is not that easy to do. Use it in two modes. First mode is the normal. But if suddenly the position changes beyond expectation or an interference is found, then it should switch over to the dish.
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Dish antennas would be larger and more expensive than the non-directional antennas used now. It might be easy to get the antenna pointed in the right direction to keep out ground based interference when on a vehicle. For something that is supposed to be small and move around, like a cell phone, then getting the dish pointed in the right direction could be a problem. That's if we ignore any issues of size and cost.
A phased array of antennas might be able to keep ground based interference out. That could
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The antennas used for vehicular GPS now are about as thick as a pencil, and around an inch square. That's why.
We have alternatives to GPS for navigation. (Score:3)
Before satellite based navigation was a thing we had various radio navigation beacons. Before radio navigation we had navigation by the stars and by markers. Lighthouses are one kind of marker to navigate by, as are street signs. Then we have inertial navigation systems, but they can only measure changes in location, they need some method of setting a reference point. Interest in these old technologies are growing as jamming of satellite navigation becomes a problem.
Navigation by inertial sensors should be trivial enough as these sensors already exist in phones, for knowing to wake up when moved and for tracking motion in AR/VR games. I don't know if vehicle navigation systems have inertial sensors but they appear to have the means to detect motion from video cameras, cameras already in cars for looking behind them when backing up. Again, this won't tell a vehicle or phone where they are, only how they move, but with something to set a reference point we have systems that can navigate by these sensors with high enough precision and accuracy for getting people and cars from point A to point B.
We have had automated celestial navigation for decades. This is a tool military forces have used before satellite navigation was a thing, and still used today as a backup to GPS. With video sensors and computing power so cheap today the expense in adding this to phones and vehicle navigation should approach zero very quickly. With pattern recognition getting better we could have systems navigate by picking up on road signs, or by recognizing buildings and other landmarks.
We have terrestrial systems for radio navigation. One is VOR/DME, another is LORAN. Both use radio transmitters that are more powerful than anything on a satellite. One problem might be the size of the antennas required. VOR/DME use VHF frequencies so the antenna might be too big for something that is supposed to fit in a pocket, but not too big for a car. Cars already have VHF receivers, we just call them FM radios. LORAN uses much lower frequencies so an efficient antenna would be large even for a car, but not for ships and aircraft built large enough to cross oceans. LORAN wasn't very accurate, it's intended for people to find ports along a coast when traveling long distance over the sea, not to find a street address. Something like LORAN could be combined with sensors and software to get a precise fix on location as a vehicle moves. We see this used with GPS now, computers can calculate out the errors in position by comparing past locations over time to motions detected by accelorometers.
If GPS jamming becomes a big enough issue then I expect demand for accurate backup systems to come up, and then once one manufacturer attempts to fill this demand then others should follow. We are seeing concern for the loss of VOR/DME beacons as they've been valuable for aircraft that have experienced GPS jamming. I believe LORAN is history now with stations closed long enough that they'd have fallen into disrepair or been dismantled, but something like it could be built again. VOR/DME is believed to be redundant because of GPS so that's lead to efforts to close down beacons as a cost saving measure. Having redundant navigation systems could be seen as vital if there's people successfully jamming and spoofing one system for the purpose of theft and other criminal behavior.
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Why Stop when your GPS Stops? (Score:2)
It seems the real story is that the drivers are bribed to stop and turn in
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Modern trucks have real-time fleet tracking systems that receive location data and transmit it back to the home office. The driver's navigation system probably wouldn't even notice the GPS signal gone due to compensation like inertial navigation (if phone based). But the company headquarters would just see that the truck's data was missing for a brief window. They wouldn't know the truck moved off the road.
I wouldn't be sure the truck driver wasn't in on it. It's not his load, so it's still proper to ca
That link doesn't say what the article claims. (Score:2)
So, no, Russia is not using it to jam commercial flights in Ukraine. They're still being dicks, but no
Can GPS Jammers Really Block GPS Tracker Tracking? (Score:1)