GPS Spoofing: New Digital Menace in Civilian Airspace

In 2023, at the least 20 civilian plane flying by way of the Center East have been misled by their onboard GPS models into flying close to Iranian airspace with out clearance—conditions that might have provoked a world incident. These planes have been victims of GPS spoofing, through which misleading alerts from the bottom, disguised as reliable alerts from GPS satellites in orbit, trick an plane’s devices into reporting the plane’s location as someplace that it isn’t. Spoofing is a extra refined tactic than GPS jamming, through which malicious alerts overwhelm a focused GPS receiver till it may well not perform.

Lengthy theorized, GPS spoofing assaults have more and more cropped up in civilian airspace in recent times, prompting considerations about this new frontier in digital warfare. IEEE Spectrumspoke with Todd Humphreys of the College of Texas at Austin about how spoofing works and the way plane could be protected against it.

What’s an instance of a GPS spoofing assault?

Todd Humphreys: In 2017, we started to see spoofing assaults taking place within the Black Sea. As time progressed, the spoofing has solely gotten extra refined and extra widespread. These days, for those who’re within the Jap Mediterranean, and also you’re on a flight certain for Turkey or Cyprus or Israel, it’s very seemingly that the GPS models in your plane will get spoofed. They may point out a place on the Beirut airport or in Cairo. And it’s as a result of Israel is sending out alerts that idiot GPS receivers for a whole bunch of kilometers across the nation.

How can spoofing be detected?

Humphreys: It’s provable that you just can’t, in all instances, detect spoofing. That’s as a result of GPS is a one-way system. It broadcasts alerts, but it surely doesn’t take any enter from the receivers. So there’s at all times the opportunity of someone broadcasting a lookalike sign and fooling a receiver.

How can airways cut back the possibilities of their planes’ GPS models being spoofed?

Humphreys: There’s an antenna on the entrance of huge business plane, and within the aft additionally, there’s an antenna. Combining these collectively and analyzing the alerts from them would allow you to detect nearly all instances of spoofing.

So what’s the catch?

Humphreys: I spoke with Boeing about this a few years in the past. I stated, “Look, I’d prefer to give you a method of mixing the alerts from these two completely different antennas in order that you might extra readily detect spoofing.” They usually identified that it was crucial for his or her techniques that these antennas function totally independently as a result of they’re there for redundancy. They’re there for security causes.

Will the combat towards spoofing at all times be an arms race?

Humphreys: There may be typically a trade-off between conventional security on the one hand—and then again, purposeful assaults from strategic adversaries. So it actually is determined by what you’re attempting to guard your self from. Is it that perhaps certainly one of your inner GPS antennas is simply going to spontaneously fail, which does occur? Or is it that your most urgent concern is being caught within the crossfire of a battle zone and having your GPS receiver spoofed with out understanding? Sadly, it’s robust to deal with each of those issues with the identical {hardware} on the identical time.

This text seems within the January 2025 situation as “5 Questions for Todd Humphreys.”