GPS Attacks Against Commercial Airliners

How does total navigation failure sound for starters?

Commercial airline crews are reporting dozens of GPS spoofing attacks causing their navigation systems to fail — just since September.

So far these attacks are in the Mideast.

The attack spoofs a real GPS signal to make the plane think it is somewhere else instead of where it is.

Besides potentially causing midair collisions, in the Mideast, it could cause a commercial airliner to go into restricted airspace. And get shot down.

According to current reports, the attacks are CURRENTLY centered around Baghdad, Cairo and Tel Aviv.

The group, named OPSGROUP, is an international group of pilots and flight technicians, has reported has tracked more than 50 attacks since September.

To make matters more concerning, the attack also corrupts fallback navigation systems.

Commercial (civilian) GPS receivers do not have a signal validation feature, much like most of the Internet. When we built the GPS protocols back in the early 1980s, that was not a thing. The military version of GPS receivers does have some anti-spoofing capability. The EU’s competitor to the U.S.’s Navstar GPS, called Galileo, will have some authentication built in, but it won’t come online for years and there is no guarantee that the civilian receivers will add that feature due to cost.

There are multiple ways to degrade the effectiveness of a GPS receiver. The simplest is by traditional signal jamming. A more sophisticated attack could corrupt GPS receivers with fake data.

This particular attack compromises – corrupts – the inertial reference system (IRS) of the plane. When this is done, all the crew can do is radio air traffic control and ask them where they are and in what direction they should head. This is possible because the IRS system in commercial planes is not isolated from other systems.

Professor Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin says that there have been very powerful signal jammers near Syria for a long time and the head of U.S. Special Operations Command says that Syria has the most aggressive electronic warfare environment on the planet. But this is way more sophisticated than signal jamming.

There is no obvious solution to this short of changing the GPS software (relatively easy as there are only a couple dozen satellites) and replacing a billion GPS receivers.

Everything from planes, trains and automobiles use GPS as a critical tool and if all you want to do is cause chaos, this would work with trains coming to a halt because they can’t navigate, farmers unable manage their crops and construction projects brought to a complete halt.

Over land, where there may still be VORs (basically, radio beacons that us old time pilots still remember) which can be used, but they don’t exist over the water. That is where LORAN comes in and planes typically don’t have LORAN receivers.

Folks like Professor Humphreys have been sounding the alarm about this for more than a decade, but since this is both a hard and expensive problem to fix, the preferred solution is to stick your head in the sand.

While these spoofing attacks might be mostly conducted by nation state actors – at least for now – as the problem becomes more well known, other attackers might follow suit. Even if the attacks are more limited that that, it still may cause a major loss of life.

Credit: Inside GNSS and Vice