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submitted 10 months ago by L4s@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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.

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[-] cashsky@lemmy.world 187 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

TL:DR: Israel and Iran are the source of the spoofing.

Edited*

[-] gibmiser@lemmy.world 50 points 10 months ago

Wow. The state of Israel is really piling on the reasons to hate it these days.

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[-] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 46 points 10 months ago

And Iran, according to the article

[-] nixcamic@lemmy.world 56 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Israel Iran and Russia be like Israel Iran and Russia be like

[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

Lemmy is starting to feel like Discord with people dropping lazy images like this in every damn thread.

[-] newnton@sh.itjust.works 24 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

The article says the spoofing was first recorded in September from Iran, then Israel started doing some after the October Hammas attacks

[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 123 points 10 months ago

The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission

Tomorrow Never Dies continues to be bizarrely relevant.

[-] GentlemanLoser@ttrpg.network 17 points 10 months ago

Is that the one with Jonathan Pryce as the villain? That was a good one

[-] deweydecibel@lemmy.world 49 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

Johnathan Pryce as the mad, egocentric head of a mass media and tech empire with an inordinate amount of reach and influence on the world stage, who is chiefly concerned with becoming the sole source of media in a post-CCP China.

Which sounds funny and ridiculous in a 1997 spy movie, but in the last 20 years, we've seen just how much power mass media companies wield, how they can manipulate sizable percentages of a population, and how being the exclusive source of news for an entire country (China, no less) would give a media mogul incredible power and influence.

[-] GentlemanLoser@ttrpg.network 8 points 10 months ago

I'm not nervous, you're nervous

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[-] Dettweiler42@lemmyonline.com 54 points 10 months ago

That just means you can't use autoland in low visibility conditions. Modern IRUs (inertial reference unit) are highly accurate laser gyros that can use GPS for correction, but will throw out the data if it doesn't make sense. Navigation won't be affected much, and autoland (if used) will still rely on VHF guidance.

[-] Delogrand@lemmy.world 31 points 10 months ago

Modern IRUs also take input from multiple sources (GPS, Navaids) to update their drift error. With spoofed GPS, bad drift corrections are made and when the navigation solution eventually fails the IRU is just as unusable.

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[-] someguy3@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

How do IRUs work do to give you location?

[-] dhork@lemmy.world 18 points 10 months ago

Imagine you can't see or hear anything but you can read a compass, and you have an internal map of your house and neighborhood. You also know how long your steps are with some amount of accuracy. You would probably be able to get out of your house and maybe to the corner store, but the inaccuracies in your compass and distance estimation would add up over time, and on a long walk you might overshoot the sidewalk and walk down the middle of a busy street by mistake.

[-] scarabic@lemmy.world 13 points 10 months ago

“Give me a stopwatch and a map and I’ll fly the Alps in a plane with no windows?”

This was supposed to be a wild boast by the Russian navigator in Hunt for Red October but is apparently now standard piloting procedure.

[-] Maudfer@lemmy.world 15 points 10 months ago

They know where you took off from, and can detect your movement with precision.

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[-] BarrelAgedBoredom@lemm.ee 13 points 10 months ago

It's knows where it was and where it isn't

[-] thehatfox@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

They use gyroscopes and accelerometers to measure the aircrafts movement from the starting position at takeoff. That can then be used to plot the course the aircraft has taken to show the current location.

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[-] redcalcium@lemmy.institute 8 points 10 months ago

But the article mentioned that "the spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System". How?

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[-] cmnybo@discuss.tchncs.de 34 points 10 months ago

We need a backup for GPS. LORAN should never have been shut down.

[-] Dimand@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

I can't see how omega and similar were not just as susceptible to this type of attack. Active outside in positioning almost always has this vulnerability.

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[-] AlijahTheMediocre@lemmy.world 30 points 10 months ago

I've got an idea, how bout stop using the same technology from 20 years ago?

[-] chuck@lemmy.ca 14 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

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.

[-] oatscoop@midwest.social 20 points 10 months ago

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.

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[-] firewyre@lemmy.world 29 points 10 months ago

Yet another reason to avoid the middle east

[-] thehatfox@lemmy.world 26 points 10 months ago

This sounds rather dangerous. GPS was originally opened up to civilian use for the purpose of keeping flights on course, after the disaster of Korean Air Flight 007 straying into Soviet airspace and being shot down back in the 1980s.

I can't understand what is to be gained by deliberately trying to knock civilian airliners off course.

[-] Forester@yiffit.net 21 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

GPS guided drone attacks. Civilian GPS top out at 300 m a second. Anything beyond that is a missile and GPS refuses to work unless you have one of the special government GPS chips without the limiter.

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[-] astray@lemm.ee 24 points 10 months ago

What about GLONASS, Galilleo, or BDS? Are they all being equally jammed? Why wouldn’t they sync with all of them and use a consensus to determine accuracy? Like having multiple ntp servers.

[-] CaptainBuckleroy@lemm.ee 19 points 10 months ago

The latest generations of gnss receivers have spoofing and jamming mitigation and detection features included with the chip, and multi-band rx technology to sync to more constellations simultaneously and do exactly what you're talking about. Before then, the spoofing/jamming detection would likely need a software implementation after the receiver. There are different types of spoofing/jamming, all of which are detected and mitigated in different ways.

I don't know the commercial aircraft industry standards for updating technology, but I wouldn't be surprised if most commercial aircraft don't have what you're talking about.

[-] nixcamic@lemmy.world 19 points 10 months ago

Do none of the systems, GPS, glonass etc. use encryption or authentication of any form?

[-] AreaKode@lemmy.world 14 points 10 months ago

The problem is with the way GPS works. Your device gets telemetry from the satellites. A fake signal can screw up the whole system.

[-] jormaig@programming.dev 7 points 10 months ago

But if they had authentication you would know that the message doesn't come from a legitimate satélite.

[-] Gormadt 7 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

If their isn't then there's a big problem with implementing that now, which would require a retrofit of every single GPS system currently in use and likely a replacement of all GPS satellites

Edit: I'm slightly mistaken, the military uses encryption but they don't have that open for public use.

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[-] Lafrack@lemmy.world 12 points 10 months ago

Yes Galileo supports encryption. But as far as I know it's not in use. Has been trialled only. But I know all Airbus aircraft only support GPS satellites and nothing else (yet). I assume Boeing, being American would be the same then.

As far as solutions go, an aircraft can navigate fine without GPS. It can update its position from ground navigation aids and if they are not available it can still Dead Reckon very well. The navigation error very slowly grows until it's out of the black spot and can use GPS or navigation aid to increase its accuracy. But this navigation error on the time frame of say an hour is a matter of kilometers at most, not dozens.

[-] SeriousBug@infosec.pub 11 points 10 months ago

Nope. And more importantly, it looks like nobody considered what might happen if the signal gets spoofed. The backup systems that are supposed to keep working if GPS breaks also break due to these spoofed signals.

[-] Ajen@sh.itjust.works 8 points 10 months ago

GPS is encrypted, it's just that the US military won't share the encryption keys so the rest of us have to use the unencrypted channels. They've clearly thought about it and decided against making it public.

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[-] KingThrillgore@lemmy.ml 19 points 10 months ago

I generally don't believe in an isolationist American policy except for Israel. They always drag us into stupid shit like this.

[-] just_change_it@lemmy.world 8 points 10 months ago

Easy solution: homing rockets that seek out the strongest signal using that band. Whitelist the sources that are official and proper.

GPS is passive so the rockets won't go for the plane... it'll go for the transmission tower.

Use less destructive devices if you'd rather risk sending humans to do the job.

[-] Ilovethebomb@lemm.ee 9 points 10 months ago

It's called a HARM, Homing Anti Radiation Missile.

[-] Magister@lemmy.world 6 points 10 months ago

Nobody knows what to do?

How they did between 1890 and 1980? Maybe with paper maps and their eyes? It needs investigating!

[-] Socket462@feddit.it 16 points 10 months ago

I don't know from 1903 to 1980 but from 1890 to 1903 they did not fly at all. The first "modern" flight happened in December 1903.

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[-] VonReposti@feddit.dk 8 points 10 months ago

They winged it

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this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
425 points (100.0% liked)

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