GPS-guided ships, planes can be taken over remotely with ease, says expert
SHIPS and aircraft relying on Global Positioning System for navigation are vulnerable to having command and control remotely transferred from bridge and cockpit to a laptop anywhere in the world without anyone knowing, says a Texas radionavigation expert.
Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, said this can be done by one of two methods - spoofing and jamming. Unlike a jammer, which blocks or scrambles GPS signals, a spoofer mimics information coming from a satellite, he said.
"It can make an aircraft, ship or other GPS-guided device think it's somewhere that it's not," he said, adding that civil GPS signal is open and vulnerable to attack, because there is no authentication or encryption.
Testing jammers, British researchers aimed a low-level GPS jammer at test ships in the English Channel. "Ships veered off course without the crew's knowledge. False information passed to other ships about their positions, increasing the likelihood of a collision. The communications systems stopped working, meaning the crew couldn't contact the coast guard. And the emergency service system - used to guide rescuers - completely failed."
Dr Humphreys, who specialises in the application of optimal estimation techniques to problems in satellite navigation, orbital and attitude dynamics and signal processing, was the keynote speaker at ICT Knowledge Transfer Network conference in London last week.
"If you're a rogue nation, or a terrorist network and you'd like to cause some large scale damage - perhaps not an explosion but more an economic attack against the United States - this is the kind of area that you might see as a soft spot," he said.
The system is vulnerable to attack because signals coming from the network of GPS satellites orbiting the earth are weak. They're about 12,000 miles away. It doesn't take much to disrupt them, he said.
The new GPS landing system at Newark airport was crashing several times a week, forcing airliners to switch to a backup system, he said. It turned a man was moonlighting in a GPS-tracked company van and was using a jammer to obscure his movements. Every time he drove by Newark airport, he took down the landing system.
SHIPS and aircraft relying on Global Positioning System for navigation are vulnerable to having command and control remotely transferred from bridge and cockpit to a laptop anywhere in the world without anyone knowing, says a Texas radionavigation expert.
Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin, said this can be done by one of two methods - spoofing and jamming. Unlike a jammer, which blocks or scrambles GPS signals, a spoofer mimics information coming from a satellite, he said.
"It can make an aircraft, ship or other GPS-guided device think it's somewhere that it's not," he said, adding that civil GPS signal is open and vulnerable to attack, because there is no authentication or encryption.
Testing jammers, British researchers aimed a low-level GPS jammer at test ships in the English Channel. "Ships veered off course without the crew's knowledge. False information passed to other ships about their positions, increasing the likelihood of a collision. The communications systems stopped working, meaning the crew couldn't contact the coast guard. And the emergency service system - used to guide rescuers - completely failed."
Dr Humphreys, who specialises in the application of optimal estimation techniques to problems in satellite navigation, orbital and attitude dynamics and signal processing, was the keynote speaker at ICT Knowledge Transfer Network conference in London last week.
"If you're a rogue nation, or a terrorist network and you'd like to cause some large scale damage - perhaps not an explosion but more an economic attack against the United States - this is the kind of area that you might see as a soft spot," he said.
The system is vulnerable to attack because signals coming from the network of GPS satellites orbiting the earth are weak. They're about 12,000 miles away. It doesn't take much to disrupt them, he said.
The new GPS landing system at Newark airport was crashing several times a week, forcing airliners to switch to a backup system, he said. It turned a man was moonlighting in a GPS-tracked company van and was using a jammer to obscure his movements. Every time he drove by Newark airport, he took down the landing system.