Posted on 04/03/2019 9:25:54 PM PDT by ameribbean expat
Researchers at a Washington-based think tank have noticed that a funny thing happens whenever Russian President Vladimir Putin gets close to a harbor: The GPS of the ships moored there go haywire, placing them many miles away on the runways of nearby airports.
According to a new report by security experts with the group C4ADS, the phenomenon suggests that Putin travels with a mobile GPS spoofing device and, more broadly, that Russia is manipulating global navigation systems on a scale far greater than previously understood.
“Russia continues to act as a pioneer in this space, exposing its willingness to not only deploy these capabilities in protection of VIPs and strategically-important facilities, but also to leverage these techniques to promote its ventures at frontiers in Syria and Russia’s European borders,” the report says.
(Excerpt) Read more at foreignpolicy.com ...
Your GPS is easy to mess with if you are only using a few elements, but if you are using more than a few, the redundancy makes it progressively difficult to manipulate. This is not a national security issue.
What is an element.
Does spoofing GPS affect cruise missile targeting? Or do cruise missiles rely on inertial nav, or ground scan radar reading preprogrammed data?
(this straight out of old Tom Clancy data, Red Storm Rising, so I'm not telling tales out of school.)
“Or do cruise missiles rely on inertial nav, or ground scan radar reading preprogrammed data?”
They use multiple systems. They will get you!
NAVSTAR GPS satellite system: These 24 main GPS satellites orbit Earth every 12 hours, sending a synchronized signal from each individual satellite. Because the satellites are moving in different directions, a user on the ground receives the signals at slightly different times. When at least four satellites get in touch with the receiver, the receiver can calculate where the user is – often to a precision of just a few feet, for civilian use.
No, cruise missiles would be unaffected. A JDAM potentially could, kinda.
” would the entire US military base its targeting on a useless paradigm? “
A Proverb from Russian Prison Camps: “Questions are never dangerous. Only the answers.”
After what we have seen from Boeing recently. I wouldn’t assume anything.
Does spoofing GPS affect cruise missile targeting?
Potentially it would, but targeting depends on the missile type and targeting system. However, military GPS is not the same as civilian GPS. The ships mentioned in the article use civilian GPS.
That said, it would not be surprising if the US, Russia, and China have systems to spoof military GPS - as well as counters for each others’ spoofing systems and counters for those etc.
All of which is why missiles use combinations of targeting systems with the last leg usually either some form of AI or an internal ground matching map.
The civil signal, the C-(coarse) code is unencrypted. Up until 1999 is was deliberately distorted by the addition of “military error” to make it less useful. Spoofing the P-(precision) code is impossible without knowing the crypto key. The P-code has ten times the precision, and is transmitted with much more power than the C-code.
While GPS is susceptible to jamming, the real threat imho is from anti-satellite weapons.
The civilian GPS signal is unencrypted. The military signals are far more powerful and precise and are encrypted. The encryption keys are classified SECRET, and require special access. A GPS receiver with classified keys loaded is unclassified, the assumption being that the enemy cannot recover the key from the receiver.
Most of the power of GPS is not available to the civilian world.
Interesting, probably explains why we haven’t been able to hit any Russian targets in Syria.
“Does spoofing GPS affect cruise missile targeting?”
I don’t know, but I suspect that the rationale of our Obama-appointed military leaders, along with public school-educated adults in this country likely goes something like this:
“Well, GPS works great for me and has a proven reliability of over 99.99% in the past decade, so why not use it? After all, what are the odds that the next war starts during that 0.01% of the time?
I can think of at least two relatively simple ways to defeat spoofing. One suitable for any time, another quite effective in wartime, but that you probably wouldn’t want to do otherwise.
This.
A dumb gravity bomb and a good pilot does not need gps.
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