Spotlight

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.

July 2019: For weeks, a mysterious source of GPS interference has been affecting aircraft in the Middle East. Since last spring, pilots flying through airspace around Syria have noted that their GPS systems have displayed the wrong location or even stopped working entirely. A few weeks ago, the issue spread to Israeli airspace when pilots started reporting navigation problems during takeoff and landing at Ben Gurion International Airport. Data collected by Todd Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, has located the source: the mystery signal originates inside a Russian air base in Syria.

This interference to Global Positioning System (GPS) reception does not appear to be targeted at Israel; instead, it is more likely collateral damage resulting from an effort by Moscow to protect its troops in the region in the wake of drone attacks. There is possibly another motivation; Humphreys suggests that a reason behind the interference may be to demonstrate Russia’s “dominance in the radio spectrum.”

The interfering signals are so powerful, in fact, that they can be seen from space—it is using sensors onboard the International Space Station that Humphreys and his team have been tracking the phenomenon. They were able to pin down the source of the signal: Khmeimim Air Base, the center of Russia’s presence in Syria since 2015. According to Humphreys, the interfering signal appears to be a combination of jamming, in which valid GPS signals are drowned out by radio noise, and spoofing, in which valid GPS signals are mimicked in such a way as to cause receivers to report incorrect results.

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys in The Times of Israel.

July 2019: Todd Humphreys was awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) for 2019. The PECASE is the highest honor given by the United States government to scientists and engineers beginning their research careers. Nominated for the PECASE by the National Science Foundation (NSF), Dr. Humphreys is also a recipient of the UT Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award (2012), the NSF CAREER Award (2015) and the Institute of Navigation Thurlow Award (2015).

Read more on the Cockrell School website. Congratulations, Dr. Humphreys!

April 2019: A yearlong study by security experts with the Washington-based think tank C4ADS conducted by identified a pattern in which GPS devices near Putin and his entourage suddenly gave incorrect readings. The researchers also identified five buildings associated with the Kremlin that appeared to employ the technique on a rolling basis. The researchers theorize that one reason “spoofing” is deployed is to protect Putin and other Russian officials from attacks or surveillance by drones that rely on GPS.

However, there’s a drawback to creating a GPS bubble around a world leader, said Todd Humphreys, an engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin, who was involved with the study. It also makes it easier to keep track of Putin. “What’s ironic is if you look at these patterns, and if you coordinate it with the movements of the leader of Russia, it appears you have a Putin detector,” Humphreys said. In other words, if you detect spoofing, there’s a good chance Putin may be nearby.

Read the full articles featuring Dr. Humphreys on CBS News and Foreign Policy. In addition, check out this segment from the Daily Show with Trevor Noah and an interactive version of the report, “Above Us Only Stars.”