Spotlight

GNSS: The Unseen Pillar of Modern Society

June 2025: Society’s dependence on GNSS is widespread, and users of different services reliant on GNSS “are not all acutely aware of the risks associated with their dependency on it and the ways that the system can be disrupted or degraded,” according to Caitlin Durkovich, a former national security official and critical infrastructure expert.

The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys is “most concerned about aviation.” He says “At least one fatal aviation accident in Europe can be traced to GNSS interference as a primary cause. A deliberate attack against US aviation, as opposed to the collateral attacks in Europe, would cause astounding economic harm.”

For more on the story, and a look into the highly unlikely scenario where the entire GPS network were in an outage, read the WIRED story here.

New Security Threats in the Skies

April 2025: Vanity Fair reports that a DHL pallet in Birmingham, England, last July caught fire, with a similar events occurring in Leipzig, Germany and near Warsaw, Poland. The incendiary devices were suspected to be part of an “ongoing campaign to sow chaos across Western Europe” by Russia’s military intelligence agency.

The ongoing campaign includes “sabotage and hijacking as well as more modern kinds of strikes, such as breaching databases, tampering with navigational systems, and potentially even the hacking of onboard systems.” One example is the manifestation of a demonstration conducted by the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys showcasing GPS spoofing. These types of attacks are increasingly common in certain areas of the world, and “current aircraft navigation systems can’t detect it” according to Xavier Orr, cofounder of Advanced Navigation. For more on the story read the Vanity Fair article here.

The Science and Strategy Behind D2C

April 2025: The RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys gives a talk on Direct-to-Cellular (D2C) networks during the 2025 6G@UT Forum at The University of Texas at Austin.

Munich Satellite Navigation Summit: Starlink Based LEO PNT

March 2025: During Match, the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys attended the Munich Satellite Navigation Summit, where he gave a talk on using Starlink for PNT purposes. You can find the video of the talk here and and navigating to Session 10 around 45 minutes in.

The Growing Threat of Electronic Warfare in Civilian Airspace

February 2025: IEEE Spectrum spoke with the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys about spoofing and its effect on civilian aircraft. When asked about examples of GPS spoofing, Dr. Humphreys responded that “in 2017, we began to see spoofing attacks happening in the Black Sea” and that since spoofing has become “more sophisticated and more widespread.” He talks about how spoofing is provably not detectable under certain circumstances and that there are steps aircraft can take to mitigate. For more details, visit the article here.

RNL’s Zach Clements Wins U.S. D.O.T CARMEN+ UTC Student of The Year Award

January 2025: Zach Clements is currently a PhD student in Aerospace Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin and a member of the Radionavigation Laboratory.  His research interests include statistical signal processing, optimal estimation, and software-defined radio, with an emphasis on GNSS interference detection, classification, and localization from Low Earth Orbit.  Before his graduate work, he obtained his B.S. in Electrical Engineering from Clemson University. His has been featured in the New York Times, NPR, Politico, Financial Times, Forbes, and other media outlets discussing GNSS spoofing affecting civilian aviation.  He won the IEEE Walter Fried Award for best paper and the CARMEN+ USDoT UTC Student Paper Award for his work on GNSS interference localization. For more, see here.

AST SpaceMobile in Cellphone Satellite communication

November 2024: Some newer companies are exploring direct space-to-phone communication. These include SpaceX and AST SpaceMobile. “Sat phones have long been the gold standard for those needing connectivity in remote conditions. They are expensive to use, with rates normally running to dollars per minute. But they provide coverage in the middle of the ocean, up in the air or deep in the woods. Midland, Texas-based AST is promising to turn any ordinary cellphone, like the one in your pocket right now, into a satellite phone. They aim to do that by connecting it directly to a network of specially designed satellites parked in low-Earth orbit.”

The RNL’s Dr. Humphreys claims that the key behind using an unmodified phone for the process it to pretend that the satellite is a base station that pre-compensates for extra delays and Doppler. The main challenges are power, velocity, and delay. AST space mobile solves power by using a large antenna, according to Dr. Humphreys. For more details on the story, visit the Investor’s Business Daily article here.

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