Spotlight

February 2019: During Brexit negotiations, the EU said the UK cannot retain full access to its Galileo satellite program after Brexit. In November, the UK government officially announced it would be pulling out of the system to concentrate on scoping an alternative system.

“Going it alone” could permit the UK to design a system built to the specifications of just one country without needing to meet the requirements imposed by all 28 EU member states. Starting your own global system “is not something you decide to give a shot to see how it goes. It’s a perpetual commitment,” Dr. Humphreys said. “In the US, it costs up to a billion dollars just to maintain our system every year.”

The UK Space Agency, now tendering a series of key contracts, has been given £92 million to conduct a feasibility study. The government expects it will take 18 months for this initial assessment. While opinions vary on the timetable for arriving at a fully-fledged system, Dr. Humphreys suggests that “if the UK had a clear mission and the funding, they could field a system in five years.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

August 2018: Drones are increasingly becoming a security hazard in many ways. These include the weaponization of drones, targeting of commercial flights, and even attacks on heads of state. Current countermeasures include jamming the signal between the drone and the user, or even shooting the drone, but these have their own limitations and legal problems.

“[One] could quite easily modify these drones so that they go into an autonomous mode after some point, and carry out their mission without any regard for the command coming from the ground,” Dr. Humphreys says. “If that’s the case, then you can’t simply ward off these drones by jamming.”

Perhaps new legislation will help improve these defensive measures.

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

August 2018: Drones have become more present and accessible in the last couple of years. Their increasing presence now poses as a security challenge for authorities worldwide. These drone threats include everything from the security of heads of state to unauthorized surveillance.

Defense strategies are being implemented to intercept drones being used in these ways. But they may not be enough. “It is very difficult to hit a drone that is coming at high speed, at 100 km/h (70 mph), and it’s not hard to build drones that do that,” Humphreys said.” Even if you could hit one drone that came in at high speed, what if five or 10 of them attacked you all at once?”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

August 2018: Once started as a military project, GPS has found its way into the pockets of people worldwide, but it isn’t just used for maps. In fact, it is a very precise clock for computers around the Earth. When the GPS network fell apart for hours in 2016, it showed the network’s vulnerability to interference from pigeon poop on cell towers to GPS spoofing.

Such methods “would certainly work against Ubers, Waymo’s self-driving cars, delivery drones from Amazon,” and more, says Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Because GPS is so pervasive in today’s technology and economy, it needs to either be better protected or less relied upon. 

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

August 2018: Once started as a military project, GPS has found its way into the pockets of people worldwide, but it isn’t just used for maps. In fact, it is a very precise clock for computers around the Earth. When the GPS network fell apart for hours in 2016, it showed the network’s vulnerability to interference from pigeon poop on cell towers to GPS spoofing.

Such methods “would certainly work against Ubers, Waymo’s self-driving cars, delivery drones from Amazon,” and more, says Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

Because GPS is so pervasive in today’s technology and economy, it needs to either be better protected or less relied upon. 

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

A preliminary NTSB report involving the fatal Tesla crash in March has just be released. The report describes the accident:

 A Tesla Model X operating in Autopilot mode was originally following a car in front of it. Seven seconds before the crash, the system began steering left and accelerated into a highway barrier. The driver’s hands were not on the wheel for the six seconds preceding the crash.

“What strikes me from the NTSB preliminary report is that the car was silent—no visual or auditory alert at all—as it drove straight into the concrete median barrier,” says Dr. Humphreys “Yet the car’s forward radar must surely have sensed the highly reflective crash attenuator mounted on the barrier.” The preliminary report does not address the cause of the accident. A final conclusion is due in the coming months. 

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

The Uber self-driving vehicle involved in fatal accident earlier this year wasn’t set to stop in an emergency, states a preliminary NTSB report. The Uber vehicle, a Volvo sport-utility car, is equipped with automatic emergency braking, however the system was disabled by Uber to “reduce the potential for erratic vehicle behavior.”

According to the NTSB, the Volvo system decided 1.3 seconds before the impact that emergency braking was needed. “Over those critical 1.3 seconds, the car could have slowed down from 43 to 24 mph before the collision,” says Dr. Humphreys. “That would have given the pedestrian a better chance of surviving the collision.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Since its inception, global reliance on GPS has increased tremendously. The Department of Defense has recognized this dependence as a single point-of-failure and is seeking to augment GPS with other systems to mitigate the effect of GPS jamming and spoofing. The goal is not to replace GPS, only to augment it with other redundant systems.

One potential solution are pseudo-satellites: “transmitters deployed in terrestrial constellations and, potentially, in aerial vehicles.” Other systems might target situational awareness: identifying when GPS has been compromised and informing commanding officers when it occurs.

“Situational awareness is critical in the cyberwarfare realm… Spoofing attacks that succeed keep targets in the dark long enough to accomplish their objectives, says Todd Humphreys… Conversely, targets want to detect an attack as soon as possible so they can take corrective action.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

 The Russian military has been jamming US military drones in Syria for the past several weeks following a series of suspected chemical weapons attacks on civilians in eastern Ghouta. The Russian military was concerned about retaliation and began jamming the GPS systems of drones, impacting US operations.

“Jamming, which means blocking or scrambling a drone’s reception…can be uncomplicated”, says Dr. Humphreys. “GPS receivers in most drones can be fairly easily jammed.“ 

Russia was caught jamming drones in Ukraine after the invasion of Crimea. The jammers has a significant impact on the United Nations surveillance fleet, grounding it for days.

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.

Since GPS’ inception in the 1970s, global reliance on the timing and positioning system has steadily increased. Today, GPS is used to do everything navigation to time-stamping financial transactions to dropping bombs. While GPS has certainly changed modern society for the better, researchers have become concerned with the global dependency on the service. What happens if it’s suddenly not available?   

GPS is vulnerable to attacks like jamming and spoofing. Five years ago, Todd Humphreys and a group of researchers boarded an $80-million yacht and spoofed GPS signals to lead it off course. “During that experiment, none of the equipment on the yacht’s bridge ever set off an alarm,” said Todd Humphreys. “The spoofing was so subtle that the automated systems could not detect that anything was wrong.”

Now researchers are scrambling to find a way to harden GPS against attacks. Many researchers are looking at integrating signals from different sources such as radio, TV, and cell signals. “For robustness, you really need multiple sources.”

Read the full article featuring Dr. Humphreys.