Spotlight

May 2025: Congratulations to Sam Morgan for receiving IEEE/ION PLANS 2025 Best Student Paper Award. For more, see here.

April 2025: Vanity Fair reports that a DHL pallet in Birmingham, England, last July caught fire, with a similar events occurring in Leipzig, Germany and near Warsaw, Poland. The incendiary devices were suspected to be part of an “ongoing campaign to sow chaos across Western Europe” by Russia’s military intelligence agency.

The ongoing campaign includes “sabotage and hijacking as well as more modern kinds of strikes, such as breaching databases, tampering with navigational systems, and potentially even the hacking of onboard systems.” One example is the manifestation of a demonstration conducted by the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys showcasing GPS spoofing. These types of attacks are increasingly common in certain areas of the world, and “current aircraft navigation systems can’t detect it” according to Xavier Orr, cofounder of Advanced Navigation. For more on the story read the Vanity Fair article here.

February 2025: IEEE Spectrum spoke with the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys about spoofing and its effect on civilian aircraft. When asked about examples of GPS spoofing, Dr. Humphreys responded that “in 2017, we began to see spoofing attacks happening in the Black Sea” and that since spoofing has become “more sophisticated and more widespread.” He talks about how spoofing is provably not detectable under certain circumstances and that there are steps aircraft can take to mitigate. For more details, visit the article here.

November 2024: Some newer companies are exploring direct space-to-phone communication. These include SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile. “Sat phones have long been the gold standard for those needing connectivity in remote conditions. They are expensive to use, with rates normally running to dollars per minute. But they provide coverage in the middle of the ocean, up in the air or deep in the woods. Midland, Texas-based AST is promising to turn any ordinary cellphone, like the one in your pocket right now, into a satellite phone. They aim to do that by connecting it directly to a network of specially designed satellites parked in low-Earth orbit.”

The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys claims that the key behind using an unmodified phone for the process it to pretend that the satellite is a base station that pre-compensates for extra delays and Doppler. The main challenges are power, velocity, and delay. AST space mobile solves power by using a large antenna, according to Dr. Humphreys. For more details on the story, visit the Investor’s Business Daily article here.

November 2024: The Hudson Institute held an event with a panel discussion titled “Navigating GPS Vulnerabilities: Implications for US Economic and National Security.” During this panel, the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys gave a presentation on “Civil PNT Caught in the Crossfire.” For a transcript of the panel, visit their website here, and for a video of his presentation, visit the uploaded video here.

October 2024: Dr. Humphreys attended the Brooklyn 6G Summit and gave a presentation on Day 2 titled “Bracing for Interference: Electronic Warfare and its Spillover Effects.” For a video of the presentation visit IEEE’s stream here, where Dr. Humphreys presentation starts around 4:19:00.

October 2024: The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys spoke at the Department of Transportation’s annual Civil GPS Service Interface Committee meeting on America’s susceptibility to GPS jamming and spoofing from space. Specifically, he says “there is every reason to believe China’s BeiDou global navigation satellite system has the ability to imitate American GPS signals and those of Europe’s Galileo.” According to SpaceNews, “unlike many of its adversaries, the United States has made few preparations for such attacks on its homeland and infrastructure, despite mishaps at home that have disrupted air traffic control systems and regular press reports of American weapons systems degraded by jamming and spoofing overseas.”

“While Russia’s GLONASS satnav system is much older and less capable than China’s, the Putin regime seems to be pursuing its own course for being able to deliver knockout blows to GPS, as Moscow threatened it would do in November 2021 if NATO crossed its red line and interfered with the invasion of Ukraine.” For more details on the story, visit the SpaceNews article here.