March 2024: Since August of 2023, “pilots operating in the Middle East began to report instances of their onboard navigation systems being overtaken by fake GPS signals. The first reported incidents took place in a strip of Iraqi airspace close to the country’s border with Iran that is commonly used by flights traveling between Europe and the Gulf states.” The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys along with Zach Clements have been using data from low-earth-orbit satellites to geolocate the spoofing sources. Their efforts located a spoofer close to a location in the Iranian capital, Tehran. “On Oct. 15, the IDF acknowledged that GPS signals along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based, would be restricted but made no reference to spoofing.” Dr. Humphreys says, “you know it’s gone mainstream not when the Russians are practicing it, or the Iranians, or the Chinese, but when allies of the United States are practicing it.” For more, read the article here.

March 2024: Jeff Wise, journalist and aviation expert, has written an article summarizing the information that can be gleaned from barnacles found on Flight MH370’s debris. That information, paired with the communications system providing pings onboard turning off raise more unanswered questions. The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys says “after a failed search, you have to recalibrate,” and that “sometimes you preclude the possibility of even looking for evidence because you have very strong priors against it. I think by this point, we’ve been pushed into a corner where we do need to revisit those priors.” For more on the story, read New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer article here.

March 2024: The FCC has an ongoing investigation of phone manufacturers like Apple,
Google, Samsung, and Nokia whose devices receive signals from satellites owned by foreign adversaries – violating federal rules. The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys informs that using these signals in addition to approved signals would only improve positioning solutions. The more satellites used, the higher the solution precision, “especially in urban areas where the view of the sky is limited.”

Representative Mike Gallagher, the Republican chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party, provides one reason for these companies allegedly violating FCC rules. He suggests that the US is lagging far behind in deploying and activating the next generation of GPS satellites. For more on the story, read the article here or the transcript here.

March 2024: “Deep Dive: MH370” is a podcast by journalist and aviation expert Jeff Wise, and OnMilwaukee publisher Andy Tarnoff. It presents a deep dive on Malaysian Airlines flight 370 that disappeared in 2014. In part 2 of their 24th episode, they talk to the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys to get an opinion on how likely GPS spoofing can be. For more, visit their website here.

March 2024: An Aviation International News (AIN) article summarizes recent events of GPS jamming and spoofing. According to the article, last year fake signals caused issues for aircraft over the Black Sea. OpsGroup first reported these events citing missing or inaccurate information from the aircraft navigation systems. Since then, more and more spoofing events have been occurring, many times found in forums for pilots. These spoofing events take on various forms, with aircraft spoofed to a specific static area, or spoofed to within 100 nm from its location. OpsGroup advises ” watching for a sudden increase in the EPU on cockpit displays” since spoofing causes a “jump, hence EPU values have jumped from 0.1 nm to 60 nm, and more than 99 nm in quick order.”

The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys says “The main fallback is an inertial sensor or the [IRS]. When that gets captured, you realize that the design itself…appears to be flawed. In other words, the IRS is not double-checking the GPS, it’s simply flywheeling through periods of GPS outage. If the GPS indicates it has a fix, then the IRS is accepting that fix without enough skepticism and updating its location and the velocity and all of its internal coefficients based on that fix. Most business jets have something like three or two GPS receivers and usually at least two IRSs. In other words, every one of those systems that’s purportedly redundant [is] captured by the same attack, so it doesn’t offer nearly the redundancy that those who designed it thought it would. When all of these are being affected by the same source and have a common mode failure, then it doesn’t have the level of safety and security that that you might have expected.”

Dr. Humphreys along with Zach Clements were able to leverage ADS-B outputs along with data from a low-earth-orbit satellite network to geolocate the source of the spoofers, one of which is in eastern Tehran. Similar events have occurred near the Isreal-Gaza conflict, and Dr. Humphreys speculates that “this might be some of Palestine’s collaborators or it could just be the Israel Defense Forces trying to protect Israel [from the enemy’s GPS-guided missiles]. I like to say that spoofing is the new jamming, and what I mean by that is that if you have an intent to deny GPS service to your adversaries, spoofing is a more potent means of doing that than just ham-fisted jamming.” Dr. Humphreys believes that a good option for addressing the issue of spoofing aircraft is to simplify the avionics certification process, especially software-defined radios, to allow the industry to keep ahead of threads without a latency of, for example, 20 years on technology. For more details on the story, visit the original article here.

February 2024: Israel confirms disrupting GPS “in a proactive manner for various operational needs.” The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys along with Zach Clements have geolocated spoofers attributed to spoofing receivers to the Beirut–Rafic Hariri International Airport. Dr. Humphreys says “our data are taken from satellites in low Earth orbit. Israel appears to be engaging in GPS spoofing as a defensive measure.” For more on the story, read the article here.

February 2024: According to Ukrainian source, Russian forces may be using Starlink for communication inside Ukraine. SpaceX’s response has been that the company  “does not do business of any kind with the Russian Government or its military. Starlink is not active in Russia, meaning service will not work in that country. SpaceX has never sold or marketed Starlink in Russia, nor has it shipped equipment to locations in Russia.” While Starlink could prevent their service’s use in Russian-occupied territories, the Russian forces could employ methods making it difficult to exclude their terminals. The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys also suggested that “SpaceX may also be hesitant to tightly police the location of Starlinks” according to the Defense One article and that the company may “fear that a mistake in defining the front line could leave Ukraine without Starlink coverage.” For more on the story, visit the original article here.

February 2024: The IATA and EASA have reportedly announced steps to “share information about incidents of GPS tampering and make sure pilots and crew can identify when [GPS spoofing] is happening.” During these events, the aircraft will be required to use backup ground technology systems to navigate. The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys is concerned that, while some planes can switch off GPS when being spoofed, other equipment may make it impossible to switch to backups before it is too late. According to Dr. Humphreys, “commercial aircraft can be collateral damage as conflicts escalate and militaries send false GPS signals to try to intercept drones and other aircraft.” There are many applications that rely heavily on GPS, many of which have not accounted for GPS spoofing. While recent events probes the aviation industry’s response to spoofing, other systems have “yet to be tested,” says Dr. Humphreys. For more, access the WSJ article here, or a transcript here.

February 2024: As members of NATO in Europe face more and more GPS interference, some look to NATO for a response. There have been numerous reports of GPS spoofing and jamming towards recent members like Finland, older members like Poland, and prospective members like Sweden.

These GPS interference events are believed to be conducted by Russia. The RNL’s Zach Clements found that a number of transmitters are involved spread across a wide area. Both jamming for denial of service, as well as spoofing have been observed, with the latter causing commercial aircraft instruments showing them “far from their actual location and flying in a circle”. Clements Clements is reasonably sure about the source of the circle spoofing inside Russia as “[t]he points at which the aircraft began to be impacted by the spoofing and where they regained authentic GPS indicate that the spoofer is somewhere in western Russia. Interestingly, the location the aircraft were spoofed to is a field about a kilometer from Russia’s decommissioned Smolensk military airbase.” Other researchers, like Zixi Liu at Stanford, confirm some of these findings.

For more on the story, visit the article here.

February 2024: Public aircraft tracking databases indicate a recent increase in GPS interference for aircraft operating in the Baltics in the last month. Previously reported disruptions occurred on New Year’s Eve in southeastern Finland, followed by areas in Poland in mid-January. Towards the end of January, more reports of disruptions came in from southern Sweden, northern Poland, Estonia and Latvia.

The RNL’s Zach Clements expressed his confidence that Russia is the source of the spoofing. According to the Forbes article, “a number of transmitters across a large area jammed GPS to deny service and at least one was actively spoofing aircraft in such a fashion that their instruments would indicate they were flying in a circle far from their actual location. [Dana Goward (president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation)] noted that this kind of “circle spoofing” has been frequently observed with ships. The Holiday incidents were the first time it was reported in aviation. According to Clements, ‘the location the aircraft were spoofed to is a field about a kilometer from Russia’s decommissioned Smolensk military airbase.'” For more on the subject, visit the Forbes article here.