Spotlight

January 2024: “Parts of Poland, Lithuania, southern Sweden, and other countries in the Baltic region had an unexpected Christmas present this year. GPS signals were disrupted and not available in many areas on the 25th and 26th of December […] Analyses of the event by graduate students at the University of Texas Radionavigation Laboratory and Stanford University have provided some details and will likely reveal more as time goes by. Zach Clements at U.T. studied the disruption and discovered that it included several transmitters spread across a wide area. Some were simply jamming GPS signals to deny service. At least one transmitter was spoofing aircraft so their instruments would show them far from their actual location.” For more on the story, visit the article here.

January 2024: Airway UM688 has been the likely unintentional target of multiple GPS spoofing events. These events manifest as “suddenly, either the plane will start to turn or you’ll get a whole bunch of warnings: terrain failure, navigation error, position error.” The RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys believes that these sort of events are “here to stay,” as “Electronic warfare and small, cheap, attritable drones […] go hand in hand,” especially in the context of the Electronic Warfare observed in Russia’s war in Ukraine.

The complexity of the aviation industry, including aviation regulatory agencies and aircraft operators, make improving the security of the entire system challenging. According to Dr. Humphreys, “the FAA has known about the spoofing threat for over 20 years. Nothing it has done in that time has really addressed the problem. I think it’s disgraceful.” For more on the subject, visit New York Magazine’s The Intelligencer article here.

December 2023: Reports of GPS spoofing in commercial aircraft centered near the Middle East have been increasing since September of 2023. According to the RNL’s Zach Clements, “the
research community has long warned the public about something like this.” In fact, the RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys displayed the possibility by spoofing a luxury yacht in the Mediterranean a few hundred meters away from its actual position. Clements says “the necessary devices are pretty easy to get […] for less than 500 dollars.” He speculates that these attacks are for deterring drones rather than commercial aircraft. For more details of the story, visit the article here.

December 2023: GPS spoofing of aircraft has continued in the Middle East, “corrupting their backup inertial navigation systems (INS).” The RNL’s Dr. Todd Humphreys along with Zach Clements are using GNSS observables obtained from LEO satellites to geolocate the spoofers. According to Dr. Humphreys, “the device was on the eastern periphery of Tehran based on many different measurements from many different satellite over-flights.” Unfortunately, the GPS and INS integrated systems in avionics do not currently check each other to avoid ingesting falsely-assumed vetted information. Even if they did, a “crafty spoofer could capture an aircraft even though the aircraft checks data against its inertial sensor.” For more on the subject, visit the Forbes article here.

November 2023: RNL alumnus Dr. Zak Kassas has been elevated to IEEE Fellow! Here is the list of Fellows elevated in 2024. Congratulations to Dr. Kassas!

November 2023: The first cases of GPS spoofing of commercial aircraft occurring in the last couple of months. OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, “has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks.” According to the RNL’s Dr. Humphreys,
“spoofing is the new jamming. In other words, it is being used for denial of service because it’s more effective for that purpose than blunt jamming. […] But an important distinction with GPS jamming is that whereas jamming denies GPS, it doesn’t corrupt the IRS. Spoofing does, which is highly significant as regards airline safety.”

“Dr. Humphreys and others have been sounding the alarm about an attack like this occurring for the past 15 years. In 2012, he testified by Congress about the need to protect GNSS from spoofing.” He also mentions that “[aviation systems are completely unprepared for it and powerless against it].” Dr. Humphreys and the RNL’s Zach Clements are “using raw GPS measurements from several spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, [and] located the source of this spoofing to the eastern periphery of Tehran”. For more information can be found here.

November 2023: GPS spoofing events are becoming increasingly common. “Jamming is common in conflict zones. Spoofing, until recently, was rare. In the Middle East, Professor Humphrey’s research team found widespread spoofing with false signals telling pilots that their aircraft were directly above the airport in Tel Aviv when they were far away.” Visit the article here for more information on the effects widespread spoofing could have.

October 2023: Two recent articles from Politico featured comments from Dr. Todd Humphreys and Zach Clements related to their work from the “Dual-Satellite Geolocation of Terrestrial GNSS Jammers from Low Earth Orbit” paper, as well as more recent observations. Dr. Humphreys stated that their recent observations are ” the most sustained and clear indication of spoofing [he has] ever seen.” According to the Politico articles, these spoofing events hinder crucial operations such as GPS-based navigation and landing tools for planes in the area, missile guidance dependent on GPS, and also “temporary glitches in location-based applications” like Google Maps as the IDF warned. For more on the subject, visit the articles here and here.

October 2023: Locus Lock, founded by RNL alumna Hailey Nichols, was selected as one of the startups for the Fall cohort of the Techstars Space Accelerator. The selected teams “are going after big ideas in aerospace, including rapid launch services, precision-based imaging, operating systems for complex robotics, in-space servicing, and thermal protection. Demo Day is scheduled for a special in-person event on December 6th, 2023! Founders will have an opportunity to pitch their businesses to a community of investors and mentors.” More information on the selection can be found on the techstars website.

“Hailey Nichols is part of a new movement of entrepreneurial engineers coming out of the Cockrell School of Engineering. She built her path to a master’s degree while launching a startup company, Locus Lock. Last summer she received her M.S. in aerospace engineering and transitioned to a full-time role as founder of Locus Lock, a startup spun out of the Radionavigation Lab of aerospace engineering professor Todd Humphreys. Locus Lock makes a next-generation GPS receiver that provides high-integrity positioning solutions for customers globally.” For more information about Hailey’s educational journey or about Launch Texas, visit the article here.