Spotlight

“The man considered to be one of the biggest influences in the transportation world is in Austin this week. Tesla co-founder and CEO Elon Musk addressed a crowd Thursday at the 10th Annual Texas Transportation Forum. Musk, who has overseen product development and design for all of Tesla’s electric cars, also is the creative spark behind the development of rockets and spacecraft for SpaceX. Musk’s work embodies the idea of transformation, which is the theme of this year’s Texas Transportation Forum.

Continue reading the article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys, at KXAN.

“In the summer of 2012, a small robotic helicopter, painted Texas Longhorns orange and white, climbed into the air above the team’s empty football field in Austin. Then the device suddenly plummeted toward the grass, its controller overridden by a team of university- sanctioned hackers. A few days later, in the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, the same group (with permission) easily hijacked the university’s $80,000 military-grade drone.

“No one had ever done the attack that we did before,” says Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas at Austin. At least not in the declassified world. But that doesn’t mean it’s not easy to replicate. Humphreys’s team used a relatively simple hand-built radio device to exploit a major loophole in drone security: the devices’ reliance on unauthenticated position data beamed from GPS satellites.”

Continue reading the article at Popular Science. 

Dr. Humphreys lectured on “Drones: Myths, Facts, Hacks, and The Future” on Friday, November 21, 2014 as the 93rd installment of the Hot Science Cool Talks outreach series hosted by UT’s Environmental Science Institute.

To view the recorded lecture visit the ESI website and click the “View Webcast” button.

“The drone revolution isn’t coming—it’s already here. Can UT expertise help us navigate the future?

“The stadium was buzzing. It was a balmy day in late August and more than 93,000 fans were finally getting to see the topic of endless hype for themselves. Thousands of articles had been written, teeth had been gnashed, hands were wrung, and no one—not even the experts—knew what would happen. They weren’t watching the game. They were watching a tiny white helicopter with four rotors and an array of flashing lights cruising high above the Longhorns’ season opener.”

Continue reading the Alcalde article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.

A collaboration between the UT Radionavigation Lab, Cornell, and the White Rose of Drachs, is reported in the GPS World magazine.  

“A new method detects spoofing attacks that are resistant to standard RAIM technique and can sense an attack in a fraction of a second without external aiding. The signal-in-space properties used to detect spoofing are the relationships of the signal arrival directions to the vector that points from one antenna to the other. A real-time implementation succeeded against live-signal spoofing attacks aboard a superyacht, the White Rose of Drachs…, cruising in international waters.”

Continue reading the article at GPS World. 

Before March 2013, the members of the UT Austin Radionavigation Lab and the Cornell GPS Lab had never heard of the superyacht called the White Rose of Drachs… They did, however, know something relevant to superyachts and other high-value maritime and aviation assets: how to spoof their GNSS navigation systems and how to detect spoofing attacks… The spoofing and detection tests started in earnest on Friday morning, June 27th, off the southern coast of Italy… The Cornell spoofing detection system … correctly identified authentic GPS signals as such. It correctly identified spoofing attacks after the victim receiver had been dragged off to a false position and timing fix. 

Continue reading the series of Cornell blog posts.

Norddeutscher Rundfunk (North German Broadcasting), a German public television service, produced the 44-minute documentary film “Im Visier der Hacker – Wie gefährlich wird das Netz?”  The film, whose title translates to “Targeted by the hackers: how dangerous is the power?,” features interviews with Dr. Humphreys and Daniel Shepard on GPS spoofing.  The film is in German, but the producers are preparing English subtitles.  

Watch the film at NDR’s website.

“Commercial drones expected to fly US skies in coming years, delivering pizza or monitoring power lines, would be dangerously vulnerable to hackers without a variety of potentially costly countermeasures to their GPS navigation systems, results of a federal study indicate.”

Continue reading the Christian Science Monitor article that features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.

Radionavigation lab alum Dr. Zak Kassas will join the Electrical Engineering Department at The University of California, Riverside (UCR) in the Fall 2014 Quarter as an Assistant Professor. Dr. Kassas’ Ph.D. focused on studying a novel navigation paradigm termed collaborative opportunistic navigation (COpNav). COpNav aims to exploit the plenitude of ambient radio frequency signals of opportunity in the environment (e.g., cellular phone, HDTV, AM/FM, etc) to enable navigation in GNSS-challenged environments, such as indoors, deep urban canyons, and environments under malicious attacks (e.g., jamming and spoofing). Prior to pursuing his Ph.D., Dr. Kassas was a Research & Development Engineer with the Control Design & Dynamical Systems Simulation group at National Instruments Corp. and an Adjunct Professor at Texas State University. Dr. Kassas is a senior member of the IEEE, has published more than twenty refereed journal and conference articles and a book chapter, and holds one U.S. patent. Dr. Kassas’ research at UCR will span the areas of estimation, navigation, autonomous vehicles, and intelligent transportation systems.

Dr. Kassas recently held a seminar targeted at Ph.D. students and postdocs with academic career aspirations to share his advice on landing a faculty position.

RNL presented at the 2014 South by Southwest (SXSW) festival in Austin, TX, which offers the unique convergence of original music, independent films, and emerging technologies.  

On Friday, March 7, Dr. Humphreys and Jahshan Bhatti presented “Location Deception: Yacht vs. GPS Spoofer.”  Audio recording of the presentation is available on soundcloud.