Spotlight

“Satelite navigation systems are at risk from criminals, terrorists or even just bored teenagers, with the potential to cause major incidents from maritime disasters to chaos in financial markets, leading experts warned on Wednesday. From maps on car dashboards and mobile phones, to road tolls, aviation and marine navigation systems and even financial exchanges, much of modern life relies on Global Navigation Satelite Systems (GNSS) that use satelite signals to find a location or keep exact time.”

Continue reading the Reuters article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys on GPS spoofing.

The article has also been published by DailyMail, Yahoo! Finance, MSN, The Baltimore Sun, CNBC, International Business Times, and Chicago Tribune.

Austin, TX — Kyle Wesson, Daniel Shepard, and Todd Humphreys authored the cover story of GPS World on anti-spoofing techniques for civil GPS in the January 2012 edition.

The introduction reads, “Disruption created by intentional generation of fake GPS signals could have serious economic consequences. This article discusses how typical civil GPS receivers respond to an advanced civil GPS spoofing attack, and four techniques to counter such attacks: spread-spectrum security codes, navigation message authentication, dual-receiver correlation of military signals, and vestigial signal defense. Unfortunately, any kind of anti-spoofing, however necessary, is a tough sell.”

The story is online in flash or pdf format.

“Take everything that Iran says about its captured U.S. drone with a grain of salt. But its new claim that it spoofed the drone’s navigational controls isn’t implausible. Although it’s way harder to do than the Iranian boast suggests, it points to yet another flaw with America’s fleet of robot warplanes.”

Continue reading the WIRED article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys on GPS spoofing.

Austin, TX — The Radionavigation Laboratory congratulates Zaher (Zak) Kassas for being elevated to IEEE Senior Member in 2011. To be eligible for IEEE Senior Member status, an IEEE Member must:

• have experience reflecting professional maturity;
• have been in professional practice for at least ten years; and
• show significant performance over a period of at least five of their years in professional practice.

Zak Kassas is co-advised by Dr. Ari Araposthathis and Dr. Todd Humphreys.

Austin, TX — The Radionavigation Laboratory congratulates Ken Pesyna for being selected to receive the Innovative Signals Analysis Fellowship for the 2011-2012 academic year. The fellowship comes with a $4,000 stipend.

In addition to being a member of the Radionavigation Laboratory, Ken is a member of the Wireless Systems Innovation Laboratory under the supervision of Dr. Robert Heath.

Boston, MA — MIT Professor Dr. Kerri Cahoy, an expert in radio occultation, invited Dr. Todd Humphreys to present on development of the FOTON GPS radio occultation receiver. The presentation was an Invited Enrichment Lecture for her graduate-level Satellite Engineering class and other students and faculty of the MIT AeroAstro department.

Coincident with Dr. Humphreys’s visit, students Ingrid Beerer, Clayton Crail, Jason Herrera, Robert Legge, Whitney Lohmeyer, and Annie Marinan from Dr. Cahoy’s Satellite Engineering course presented the final report of their semester-long feasibility study for the GeoScan Project. The students gave an excellent overview of all the sensors that they hope to pack into the hosted payload bay of the 66 IridiumNext satellites, which will begin to be launched in 2015. A GPS-based occultation sensor is one of the primary system sensor instruments proposed for GeoScan. Lars Dyrud, who has been the primary organizer of GeoScan project, was in attendance. Program directors from NSF attended the students’ presentation virtually.

Portland, OR — Dr. Todd Humphreys chaired an ION GNSS 2011 panel session on “Improving Security of GNSS Receivers.” Dr. Humphreys began the panel with introductory remarks [pptx] noting the increasing trend of spoofing research over the past few years and also presented on practical cryptographic civil GPS signal authentication [pptx]. The panel consisted of five members from industry and academia:

• Logan Scott of LS Consulting presented on “Making the GNSS Environment Hostile to Jammers and Spoofers” [pdf]
• Javad Ashjaee of Javad presented on “GNSS In-Band Interference” [pptx]
• Mark Psiaki of Cornell University presented “Developing Defenses Against Jamming & Spoofing of Civilian GNSS Receivers ” [ppt]
• Felix Kneissl of University FAF Munich presented “Improving Security of GNSS Receivers” [ppt]
• James Farell of VIGIL GPS presented on RAIM [pdf]

Portland, OR — Six members of RNL attended ION GNSS 2011 in Portland, Oregon to present research. Four papers were presented:

• Characterization of Receiver Response to a Spoofing Attack
• A Proposed Navigation Message Authentication Implementation for Civil GPS Anti-Spoofing
• Tightly-Coupled Opportunistic Navigation for Deep Urban and Indoor Positioning
• An Evaluation of the Vestigial Signal Defense for Civil GPS Anti-Spoofing

The last paper, which Kyle Wesson presented, won the best presentation award in Session E4: Next Generation GNSS Integrity 1.

At right: Members of RNL are about to enjoy a sushi dinner following the conference. Left to right: Zak Kassas, Daniel Shepard, Todd Humphreys, Jahshan Bhatti, Kyle Wesson, Ken Pesyna, and Ryan Mitch (Cornell).