June 2020: Ships thousands of miles at sea are mysteriously reporting GPS positions near Point Reyes, which is off the coast of San Francisco. Dr. Todd Humphreys believes that this is part of the worldwide maritime spoofing that he has been studying over the past few years.
"I think we're witnessing [...] the emergence of commodity off-the-shelf spoofing devices," Humphreys said. "Someone somewhere is selling cheap turnkey GPS spoofers."
June 2020: Maritime GPS spoofing is a worldwide puzzle, and researchers have yet to uncover the motivation behind the spoofing. Until recently, spoofing signals were always broadcast over large areas to affect many ships. It now seems that spoofing has become more targeted; sometimes only one ship is affected. This suggests that new, low-power spoofing hardware has become available. In an article from New Scientist, Dr. Todd Humphreys explains:
“Over a decade ago, Chinese companies began to offer cheap jammers, which became known as ‘personal privacy devices'. I think what we’re witnessing here is the emergence of commoditized spoofing: someone has begun selling a low-cost spoofing device for use on ships.”
June 2020: Dr. Todd Humphreys was invited to the Hexagon | NovAtel® offices in March 2020 to give a presentation on the Radionavigation Lab's recent research. Read the blog post on their website here.
In his presentation, titled "All-Weather Localization and Positioning for Self-Driving Cars," Dr. Humphreys covers material from two of the Lab's recent papers:
Together, these papers represent a significant step toward realizing safe and affordable self-driving cars.