Spotlight

“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.

“The Sentinel project, which has been running since January 2011, was designed to measure GPS jamming on UK roads. The project, run by GPS-tracking company Chronos Technology, picked up the illegal jamming incidents via four GPS sensors in trials lasting from two to six months per location.”

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

“GPS signals are being routinely jammed by devices that can be bought online for little money. While most jamming is not serious, there is the potential for criminals to block, or even fake, GPS signals, a conference will be told Wednesday. The evidence of illegal jamming in the U.K. comes from roadside monitoring carried out by the SENTINEL project, which looks at whether satellite navigation systems including GPS can be trusted by their users.”

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

“This free one-day event at the British National Physical Laboratory in Teddington (London) on Wednesday, February 22 will present results of current jamming detection, and consider emerging threats such as meaconing and spoofing.The seminar runs from 9:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Interested participants must pre-register online.

Todd Humphreys, director of the Radionavigation Laboratory at the University of Texas-Austin will deliver the keynote, “PVT security: privacy and trustworthiness.”

Continue reading the InsideGNSS article.

“Ships colliding at sea, stock markets crashing, transport networks in chaos: these are some of the nightmare scenarios that researchers studying GPS-jamming techniques this week warned we could be facing if suitable countermeasures aren’t produced. The newspapers gave substantial coverage on Wednesday to a conference at the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) in west London, which highlighted the dangers society is facing as we become increasingly dependent on global navigation satellite systems (GNSS) like America’s GPS and the forthcoming European Galileo.

The problem is that GNSS satellite transmissions, which are used not just for navigation but also to provide time stamps for transactions at the stock market and to alert trains when to stop at specific stations, can easily be jammed or falsified (spoofed) with fake signals.”

Continue reading The Engineer article, which features an interview with Dr. Humphreys.

“The Global Positioning System guides our ships at sea. It’s the centerpiece of the new next-gen air traffic control system. It even timestamps the millions of financial transactions made across the world each and every day. And it’s at extreme risk from criminals, terrorist organizations and rogue states—and even someone with a rudimentary GPS jammer that can be bought on the Internet for 50 bucks, said Todd Humphreys, an expert on GPS with the University of Texas.

“If you’re a rogue nation, or a terrorist network and you’d like to cause some large scale damage—perhaps not an explosion but more an economic attack against the United States—this is the kind of area that you might see as a soft spot,” he told Fox News.”

Continue reading the Fox News article, which includes a nationally-televised interview with Dr. Humphreys.

“GPS “spoofers”—devices that create false GPS signals to fool receivers into thinking that they are at a different location or different time—could be used to defraud financial institutions, according to Todd Humphreys from the University of Texas. On an innocuous level, GPS spoofing can lead to the confusing of in-car GPS systems so that users think they are in a different location to their actual location. However, a more sinister use could be to interfere with the time-stamping systems used in high frequency trading.”

Continue reading the Wired article.

“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.