Texas students fake GPS signals and take control of an $80 million yacht

[enzo1]

No longer. In the world of secure (and insecure) networks, the act of spoofing entails faking data to take advantage of network insecurity. And as some University of Texas students led by professor Todd Humphreys have shown, it is now possible to spoof a GPS system.

That is, the students created a device that sent false GPS signals to a ship, overrode the existing GPS signals, and essentially gained control of the navigation of an $80 million yacht in the Mediterranean Sea. Here’s a video explaining how they did it:



The scientists who conducted the experiment — done with permission of the yacht’s owners — say their ability to broadcast counterfeit GPS signals that triggered no alarms within the ship’s navigation system highlights a serious flaw in transportation networks on land and sea. Some 90 percent of the world’s freight moves by sea.

Moreover other semi-autonomous vehicles, such as aircraft, are likely similarly vulnerable.

The problem is not intractable. As this technical paper published in 2011 shows, there are some possible fixes. Nevertheless, it doesn’t take too much imagination to figure out how, when most people carry a GPS enabled device in his or her pocket, that spoofing could pose a problem if not accounted for.

[GWN7]

My understanding of the GPS system from when I was in the Motorola factory in Texas was the military could lock down the system so no civilian users could access it and if they did the range would be way off so it couldn't be used for targeting.

[Schumi]

I believe the military does such things in warzones such as Afghanistan, to keep the enemy from utilizing off the shelf gps components to build cheap cruise missiles. The military has their own, non-open GPS that is far more accurate.


This is also the bulk of the plot to Tomorrow Never Dies.

[nota]

original GPS standard WAS 200FT random variation applied

but a fixed survey unit can work around to sub inch accuracy by radio linking
so as the random variation swaps you know the correction in real time

I have heard they dropped the variation some now but can boost it as they want


and yes the military has a more accurate separate system
as do the russians [maybe china too]

[1-ev.com]

here is the example of military GPS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93U.S._RQ-170_incident