Spotlight

“A small surveillance drone flies over an Austin stadium, diligently following a series of GPS waypoints that have been programmed into its flight computer. By all appearances, the mission is routine.

Suddenly, the drone veers dramatically off course, careering eastward from its intended flight path. A few moments later, it is clear something is seriously wrong as the drone makes a hard right turn, streaking toward the south. Then, as if some phantom has given the drone a self-destruct order, it hurtles toward the ground. Just a few feet from certain catastrophe, a safety pilot with a radio control saves the drone from crashing into the field.

From the sidelines, there are smiles all around over this near-disaster. Professor Todd Humphreys and his team at the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Laboratory have just completed a successful experiment: illuminating a gaping hole in the government’s plan to open US airspace to thousands of drones.

They could be turned into weapons.Continue reading and watching the FoxNews coverage:

• “Drones Vulnerable to Terrorist Hijacking, Researchers Say“
• “Are Unmanned Drones Safe in US Airspace?“
• “Domestic Drone Concerns“
• “Congress Hears Warnings about Drones in US Skies”

  Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/07/19/congress-hears-warnings-about-drones-in-us-skies/#ixzz21Sm5Ssz4

“In his small workshop cluttered with machines of all kinds, Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation at the University of Texas at Austin, shows a video his students made of a recent test. It shows a smartphone, held at arm’s length, showing Google Maps on the screen: “The device locates its position with GPS and indicates its position with a blue dot on the map.” Suddenly, the blue dot starts to move, as if the smartphone were riding in a car, but the actual smartphone stays in the same place. “

Continue reading Le Monde article  [French].

“Two years ago, a new global positioning system-based system guiding jets to runways at Newark Liberty International Airport began switching off without warning. The culprits, according to government documents, were drivers on the adjacent New Jersey Turnpike who were using cheap, illegal GPS jamming devices to prevent their employers from locating them. The devices, whose signals are as much as 1 billion times more powerful than GPS transmissions, were also blanking out the airport landing system. That passing vehicles could so easily cripple airport navigation illustrates one of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s obstacles in its $42 billion effort, known as NextGen, to convert the nation’s air-traffic control away from radar to a reliance on GPS. Wireless networks, financial institutions and power grids are also vulnerable to GPS disruption, according to studies commissioned by the U.S. government and academic experts. “The interference threats to GPS are very real and promise to get worse,” the National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Advisory Board, which is appointed by the government, said in a 2010 report. So-called spoofers may be a greater threat than jammers. They mimic signals from space and can trick a receiver into displaying the wrong location, Todd Humphreys, an assistant engineering professor at the University of Texas, said in phone interviews. “The mischief makers are looking for opportunities to prick us in our soft spots,” he said. “This is a soft spot and a pretty glaring one.”

Continue reading the Bloomberg Government article.

Watch the video news release.

Austin, TX — What’s the predictable endpoint of the trend toward ever cheaper, ever smaller, and ever more sensitive GPS?  It’s the GPS dot: a GPS tracking device first featured in the movie “The Da Vinci code” and now moving inexorably from fiction to non-fiction.  The GPS dot will fundamentally re-order our lives.  We’ll buy dots in bulk and stick them on everything we own worth more than a few tens of dollars.

But there is a dark side to the dot.  Did you know that it’s not illegal to track your family, your friends, or even your ex-girlfriend/boyfriend with a GPS dot?  The lack of effective legal means of protecting ourselves from an invasion of GPS dots will lead to use of subversive tools for protecting our personal space, such as GPS jammers and spoofers.  A rise in the use of these illicit tools has the potential to wreak havoc on the “good” GPS receivers — those built into our critical systems and infrastructure. The result: A looming showdown between privacy and GPS integrity.

What if you could use GPS technology to find your misplaced keys? How about if you could use that same technology to lie about where you were in the world or misdirect cruise ships? Dr. Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas at Austin’s Radionavigation Lab paints a picture of an utterly new future at once worrying and fascinating.Check out the following TEDxAustin coverage:

• Watch the presentation as posted on TED.com.
• Read the program flier.
• Read the script and news release.

“During the GNSS Vulnerability 2012 event at the UK’s National Physical Laboratory on Wednesday, experts discussed the threat posed by a growing number of GPS jamming and spoofing devices. The increasing popularity of the jammers is troubling, according to conference organizer Bob Cockshott, because even low-power GPS jammers pose a significant threat to cell phone systems, parts of the electrical grid, and the safety of drivers.”

Continue reading the Ars Technica article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys on spoofing.

“The illegal use of Global Positioning System (GPS) jammers in the UK has been revealed in a groundbreaking study. GPS jammers are believed to be mostly used by people driving vehicles fitted with tracking devices in order to mask their whereabouts. In one location the Sentinel study recorded more than 60 GPS jamming incidents in six months. The research follows concern that jammers could interfere with critical systems which rely on GPS.”

Continue reading the BBC article, which features an audio interview (@3:35) with Dr. Humphreys.