November 2023: The first cases of GPS spoofing of commercial aircraft occurring in the last couple of months. OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, “has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks.” According to the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys,
“spoofing is the new jamming. In other words, it is being used for denial of service because it’s more effective for that purpose than blunt jamming. […] But an important distinction with GPS jamming is that whereas jamming denies GPS, it doesn’t corrupt the IRS. Spoofing does, which is highly significant as regards airline safety.”
“Dr. Humphreys and others have been sounding the alarm about an attack like this occurring for the past 15 years. In 2012, he testified by Congress about the need to protect GNSS from spoofing.” He also mentions that “[aviation systems are completely unprepared for it and powerless against it].” Dr. Humphreys and the RNL’s Zach Clements are “using raw GPS measurements from several spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, [and] located the source of this spoofing to the eastern periphery of Tehran”. For more information can be found here.
