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- cross-posted to:
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Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.
Huh what do you propose then, go back to the 1960s and ensure they are only using VOR and DME ground equipment. There isn’t a check sum to check on GPS/GNSS it just a bunch of satellites broadcasting what they think is the correct time. If you jam those and replace them with signals close enough but wrong values you can trick the math that’s used inside the GPS/GNSS receiver that computes the the position (and velocity), and it looks like this signal can be introduced slow enough to trick the receiver in real-world applications. One trick to protect yourself is to ensure the signals you receive are from the direction you expect but we aren’t going to attach directional antennas on every face of a civilian aircraft, to ensure the strongest signal is from the top of the plane and not the bottom. Essentially civil navigation equipment isn’t supposed to be messed with and if it is authorities are supposed to go over and arrest and fine the idiots doing things over the radio they shouldnt. When the bad guy is a government well yea I guess that plan doesn’t work and governing bodies such as ICAO should impose penalties like no commerical aircraft from companies from those countries are not allowed elsewhere.
That’s one way to do it.
Or avionics companies could sell modern equipment that uses multiple constellations (GPS, GLONASS, Galileo), is capable of acquiring more satellites at a time than a 20 year old system, and has basic jamming protection like ignoring spurious signals. You know: like consumer devices have been doing for years.
Then the commercial operators could install them in their aircraft.
First Glonass is a mess, missing quite a few operational satellites Galileo is just ramping up.
Interms of what is broadcast they still work on the same principle satellites broadcast time receiver does something like a linear least squares fit to estimate position, and time.
Mixing all the sources and doing a linear least squares like fit means the bad guy has to spoof more signals, and this system will be more robust but it is susceptible to the same attack just ramped up a bit
Just equip the airliners with modified AGM-88 HARM missiles to deal with the jammers.
Yea then they just start shooting down everything randomly,
And really want needs to be modified on the missiles? Sounds more like an airliner issue to me…
Sounds like they should remove the explosive part before putting into an airliner but maybe that’s just me
Something that sounds like a production flaw to me is how the IRS gets corrupted. Sadly the article did not go too much into detail, but gyroscopes and accelerometers should not be affected by GPS data. Sure, if they do not sync up with current data, error propagation becomes a problem - especially on long flights. But i reckon gradually depreciating data is better than maliciously wrong data.
The article mentioned, that large plains have 2 GPS receivers. The spooving seems less traditional (sending wrong data with more power), but more sending a lot of incomplete data to confuse the receiver. This should introduce a desynchronization of the two receivers present, and alert the internal systems. Since it is detected, that something went wrong with the GPS, the 3 IRS can calculate the position from recorded data. This is a fallback and accuracy will depreciate. But if the pilot is aware it could still be valuable information. Additionally it is more scalable than air traffic control having to navigate affected planes.