“A hobbyist using a remote-control airplane mounted with a digital camera just happened to capture images last year of a Dallas creek running red with pig’s blood. It led to a nearby meatpacking plant being fined for illegal dumping and two of its leaders being indicted on water pollution charges.”
Continue reading the New York Times article that features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.
“Visions of the future don’t just have to come from science fiction. There’s very real technology today giving us clues about how our future lives might be transformed. So what might our future look like? And what does it take for an idea about the future to become a reality? In this hour, TED speakers make some bold predictions and explain how we might live in the future.”
Listen to the NPR Interview with Dr. Humphreys.
“Anyone who has used a Global Positioning System (GPS) navigator has seen the system’s ability to tell you precisely where you are — and, most likely, has faced frustration when the device just doesn’t work. Yet for the military — which uses GPS data for such mission-critical applications as target tracking, missile guidance, and simply getting around in foreign areas — GPS failure can be a matter of life or death. That’s why military researchers, such as those at the Air Force Institute of Technology (AFIT) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, have long been exploring alternatives to the Global Positioning System.”
Continue reading a Communications of the ACM article that features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.
Austin, TX—Zak Kassas won the best paper presentation award in the Estimation Session of the AIAA Guidance Navigation and Control (GNC) conference, 2012 for his paper entitled “Observability Analysis of Opportunistic Navigation with Pseudorange Measurements“. The awards were announced during the 2013 GNC conference.
Zak’s research focuses on devising novel techniques for opportunistic and collaborative navigation.
“University of Texas researchers recently tricked the navigation system of an $80 million yacht and sent the ship off course in an experiment that showed how any device with civilian GPS technology is vulnerable to a practice called spoofing.
Led by GPS expert Todd Humphreys, the researchers used a handheld device they built for about $2,000. It generates a fake GPS signal that appears identical to those sent out by the real GPS. The two signals reach the targeted system in perfect alignment. The strength of the fake signal slowly ratchets up and overtakes the real one.”
Continue reading the MIT Technology Review article.
“With all great innovations comes the potential for mischief. With so much of our social, commercial, and government infrastructure already online, it’s highly likely that we’ve all been targeted by cyber-attacks, even if we haven’t directly felt their results. Cars, computer cams, ATMs, databases, and power grids can be hacked. In a recent high profile case, a week before one of the world’s most elite hackers was scheduled to demonstrate how to interrupt pacemakers and implanted defibrillators, he was found dead in his apartment. A team at the University of Texas Austin recently experimented with a technique they call “GPS Spoofing.” While that may sound like a YouTube comedy series, “GPS Spoofing” could be used to deadly serious effect.”
Listed to the NHPR audio interview.
“In June, a 213-foot luxury yacht sailed off the southern coast of Italy, when, suddenly, it veered off course. But this was no sinister act worthy of a spy flick. Instead, a team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin had deliberately coerced the $80 million vessel from its track, without physically taking the helm.
With the blessing of those aboard, Professor Todd Humphreys and his graduate students employed a technique called “GPS spoofing” to effectively disorient the ship’s positioning system. Changes went undetected by alarms, and the autopilot system shifted the yacht to what it thought was the original course, not one selected by Humphreys’ team.
Watch the PBS NewsHour interview online.
“It must be pretty cool to be one of Todd Humphreys’ engineering students at the University of Texas at Austin. Last year, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security dared them to hack into a drone. (Which they did.) And this year, Humphreys and his students went to the Mediterranean to see if they could hijack an $80 million yacht.
It all started when Humphreys was giving a talk about navigation security at SXSW. After the presentation, a man approached him to say how impressed he was with the work Humphreys had done with drones. The man then handed him a card and said, “Do you think you could hijack my superyacht?”
Continue reading the Slate article.
“In a startling experiment a research team from the University of Texas successfully spoofed a ship’s GPS-based navigation system sending the 213-foot yacht hundreds of yards off course — without raising alarms or triggering a hint of the course change on the onboard monitors.
Led by assistant professor Todd Humphreys, the group used equipment what started as a faint ensemble of civil GPS signals. Those signals gradually increased in strength until they overpowered the true GPS signals, enabling them to fool the ship’s navigation system. The team sent the ship through a series of subtle maneuvers that ultimately put it on a parallel course hundreds of meters off its intended track.”
Contine reading the InsideGNSS article.
“A small team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin recently tricked a 213-foot superyacht off its course using a custom-made GPS device, rendering the $80 million vessel’s electronic maps and charts useless.
“People have come to trust their electronic chart displays,” Todd Humphreys, team leader and assistant professor at UT’s Cockrell School of Engineering, tells NBC News. These electronic chart displays get their information from civilian GPS signals — which are not encrypted. “The signals have a detailed structure, but they don’t have defenses against counterfeiting ” Humphreys says. As a result, he explains, “the concept of GPS spoofing has been known for maybe 20 years.”
A small team of researchers from the University of Texas at Austin recently tricked a 213-foot superyacht off its course using a custom-made GPS device, rendering the $80 million vessel’s electronic maps and charts useless.”
Continue reading the NBC News article.
