Posted on 11/21/2023 11:56:32 AM PST by Lonesome in Massachussets
Commercial air crews are reporting something “unthinkable” in the skies above the Middle East: novel “spoofing” attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September.
In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. 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. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it’s only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.
(Excerpt) Read more at vice.com ...
“It shows that the inertial reference systems that act as dead-reckoning backups in case of GPS failure are no backup at all in the face of GPS spoofing because the spoofed GPS receiver corrupts the IRS, which then dead reckons off the corrupted position,”
Obvously, the solution would be to have an IRS that is completely independent of GPS as a back up and sanity check. Inertial navigation depends on inertia and gravity (hard to jam) but has about one mile or so of drift per hour. GPS acts something like a periodic correction and providing a updates to correct the IRS drift. If the "corrections" are actually deceptive they will capture the IRS and could have disastrous consequences. It should not work on military systems which are encrypted. I doubt very much that the U.S. military is unaware of what is going on, but they may be keeping their powder dry and not showing their cards.
Turn it off.....................
Looks like
1) There needs to be a switch to disconnect it from the GPS when approaching possible spoofing locations, and
2) I am sure that the military has equipment which can detect and locate the spoofing locations
I guess I am old fashioned, but isn’t this why there is a navigator?
Gyros, magnetic compasses and bubbles.
“in the skies above the Middle East”
which is why they should not even consider a cease fire. Muslims cannot be trusted.
Unaware? The United States is probably the one doing the spoofing. Can’t have war without an incident.
Iran may be behind this, but likely there is a more technically advanced country assisting them.
Gee Whizz!! Who could it be? DUH!
You cannot navigate without IRS, and we have become complacent and coupled IRS to GPS. I do not know if IRS systems can operate with GPS off. Pilots used to have to manually program inertial navigation systems with airport coordinates prior to taking off. They probably haven’t done that in decades. It will take a lot of retraining.
If the same spoofing signal were received at several locations, and they exchanged signals, including time of arrival, spoofing should be immediately apparent, but that would require communication between aircraft. The spoofing signal probably has to be directed at one target aircraft to even make sense at all. The spoofer would imitate several GPS (or other navigational satellite) signals, with proper delay and pseudodoppler to look like valid GPS signals, but with higher power, and thereby capture the victim’s receiver, and lure him or her into his web.
Nasty stuff.
It is very unlikely, neigh-on impossible to pull this off against military GPS.
I worked for eight years on Honeywell’s navigation systems. The issue with inertial navigation is the systems are complex and expensive. But if you periodically correct them with a precise input then even a cheap system is more than enough for the few minutes when you can’t get a GPS input. My guess is that since GPS nobody is spending the serious cash and upkeep you’d need on a precise and reliable inertial nav system (INS.) You have to ask, okay, who can seriously f*ck with the GPS system on a wide scale? It’s a short list. Russia and China. Sure, the French, the Germans and the Brits, but they have no motivation. The Russians have the most motivation as so many of the advanced weapons sent to Ukraine use GPS for terminal guidance. Blanking out or altering the GPS signal renders all of those systems no better than dumb munitions. The difference is sending one shell at the cost of a few thousand dollars instead of hundreds of shells at the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Why would they interfere with airlines? The Russians are angry and trying to cause problems and this one is an easy, cheap one to cause. There’s a certain degree of deniability although, I guarantee, the US knows where and how it’s being done. We could counter it with a directed EMP blast, but the general western philosophy has been to avoid “provocations.” This may actually cause some deaths as planes discover they are so far off course they won’t have enough fuel to find a landing strip.
We might need to go back to earlier navigation backups like radio beacons.
Simple, just use the Chinese or Russian versions of GPS - Beidou and GLONASS.
In the early days of GPS there was a funny story about something like that. A Greek cruise ship ran aground off Cape Cod. The Captain was interviewed on a local TV news station. He complained that the GPS cable had become disconnected and it wasn’t his fault.
The Boston Coast Guard Captain of Port sent a prize crew aboard and removed all the officers from that ship. Hazelwooded them. He told the local media that you should not rely on one method of navigation. “Look out the window.”, he said. The Coast Guard brought the ship into Boston Harbor.
The brouhaha several years ago about superluminary neutrinos was ultimately traced back to a failed GPS cable.
I suspect Iran is doing it because they fear getting thumped by Israel.
Practicing before they attack the military flights?
Don’t need the locations, just who is behind it.
It seems Iran.
Which meansChina/Russia also.
The airlines are lazy or cheap. We used to do this in the Army on maneuvers to speed up deployment time (who wants to eat in the dark?).
I believe they’re using GPS to program/provide zero to their IRS system which then feeds the changes in the Inertial Navigation System (INS) while in flight. If their zero data is spoofed their INS will carry the error thru all flights.
They’re going to have to hire someone(s) to do INS zeroing at each aircraft’s gate or their daily starting point. That way when they start the aircraft they can input reliable IRS data for the INS.
Our motorpool had a marker on the ground with a 10-digit grid reference point as a zero for the INS techs to set their system to before departure. A little bit more work but that’s what was used before GPS.
The aircraft GPS/inertial nav is far more sophisticated. Spoofing GPS has been a common tactic since the days of Bill Clinton. Ron Brown's plane was likely lured into a crash using spoofed GPS.
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