Spotlight

March 2020: Admiration for GPS runs high among RNL alumni, as witnessed by K. Wesson’s new license plate!

February 2020: The Radionavigation Lab’s work in GNSS interference detection was featured on the cover of Inside GNSS, a magazine dedicated to global navigation systems. Click here to read the article from Inside GNSS.

In 2017, the Radionavigation lab placed a custom software defined receiver onboard the International Space Station as part of a larger effort to study GNSS signals in the low Earth orbit environment. Over the two year study, multiple sources of GNSS interference were identified by analyzing data from the receiver. This work was done by Radionavigation Lab members Matthew Murrian (lead author), Lakshay Narula, and Todd Humphreys. Brady O’Hanlon from MITRE Corporation and Scott Budzien from the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory were also collaborators on the project. Congratulations to the authors!

February 2020: The Institute of Navigation presented awards at their International Technical Meeting in January. These recipients are affiliated with the Radionavigation Laboratory:

• Dr. Zaher (Zak) Kassas (left) is a former member of the lab and current professor at the University of California, Irvine. He won the 2019 Institute of Navigation Thurlow Award “for foundational work in the theory and practice of exploiting signals of opportunity for accurate and reliable positioning, navigation and timing.”
  
• Dr. Todd Humphreys (center) was elected as a 2020 ION Fellow “for significant and fundamental contributions to PNT security and precise GNSS positioning for the mass market, and for dedication to GNSS education and outreach.” See articles from GPS World and the Cockrell School of Engineering.
  
• Dr. Ramsey Faragher (right) is the CEO of Focal Point Positioning and a close friend of the lab. He was awarded the 2019 Per Enge Early Achievement Award “for outstanding innovations in mobile positioning and navigation, and in particular for pioneering the revolutionary SuperCorrelation technology.” See this article from The Royal Society about his collaboration with Dr. Humphreys.

February 2020: The Army Futures Command (AFC) has partnered with the University of Texas at Austin to develop robots to assist with dangerous tasks on the battlefield. These robots will assist with non-combat jobs such as minesweeping and obstacle removal. This partnership has enabled the construction of a new robotics center at UT Austin.

“It’s a real endorsement for the Cockrell School and for UT in general,” says Dr. Humphreys, “There are really compelling problems here — at the edge of what we can currently do. For students interested in pushing the frontiers of science and research, it’s inspiring, it will have consequences, and the U.S. desperately needs it.”

Both the AFC and UT Austin are looking forward to a lasting partnership that will save lives on the battlefield while enriching students’ educational experience. Read the full article from Texas Engineer for a glimpse of some of the upcoming research.

January 2020: Dr. Todd Humphreys was interviewed by Fortune Magazine for his investigation of GPS spoofing and interference in the shipping industry. Read the Fortune article here.

January 2020: Key infrastructure of the United States, including cell-phone networks, financial markets, the electric grid, and emergency services, all depend on GPS timing signals for basic operation. A large-scale, coordinated attack could be accomplished by only a dozen or so people with the right equipment, spread out across the country.

“There is no foolproof defense,” Humphreys says. “What you can try is to price your opponent out of the game” by deploying antispoofing countermeasures. However, “if your opponent happens to be the Russian Federation,” Humphreys says, “good luck.” This isn’t an idle concern: the Center for Advanced Defense Studies, a Washington, D.C., research nonprofit, identified nearly 10,000 incidents originating at 10 locations that included the Russian Federation, Crimea and Syria. Experts in the U.S. government and in academia say Iran and North Korea also have the capability.

One solution is to implement a ground-based alternative to GPS in the form of eLoran (enhanced long-range navigation), which uses high-power, low-frequency signals that are difficult to jam or spoof. Although funding has been allocated for the construction of such a system in the United States, none has yet been spent. Many other countries rely on systems similar to eLoran as backups to GPS.

A more dramatic solution would be to augment GPS signals with digital signatures that authenticate the data by employing public-private key cryptographic methods. The signal coming from the current constellation of satellites cannot be changed, and an air force spokesperson said no plans exist to incorporate digital signatures into the next generation of satellites.

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys in Scientific American.

December 2019: Researchers at the Center for Advanced Defense Studies (C4ADS), a nonprofit that analyzes global conflict and security issues, have published evidence suggesting that GPS signal spoofing is behind maritime AIS (automatic identification system) disruptions in Shanghai. Data aggregated over many weeks showed ship locations appearing at different locations in large “rings: on the eastern bank of the Huangpu river.

At the ION GNSS+ conference in September, Dr. Humphreys showed a visualization of the data.

“To be able to spoof multiple ships simultaneously into a circle is extraordinary technology. It looks like magic,” he said. Attendees at the conference began to refer to the mysterious patterns as “crop circles.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys in the MIT Technology Review to learn what some experts think might be the reason for the mystery spoofing.

December 2020: Dr. Todd Humphreys has been investigating spoofing in Shanghai for quite some time. In this article for Inside GNSS, Humphreys offers a detailed analysis of ship positioning data and insight as to what’s going on in Shanghai.

October 2019: The Army Futures Command (AFC) has named the University of Texas Radionavigation Lab (RNL) and Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) as its strategic partners in assured positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT).

Interviewed by GPS World, Dr. Humphreys revealed that RNL’s main focus will be “… leveraging the tens of thousands of communications satellites projected to be in low earth orbit in the next few years for PNT services. […] We are working with a major provider and already have some interesting results we can share.”

Read more from the Army News Service and GPS World.