Spotlight

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.

September 2023: “Dr. Todd E. Humphreys, known for his fundamental contributions to secure, precise and robust PNT and GNSS software-defined receivers (SDR), received this year’s Johannes Kepler Award. The Institute of Navigation’s (ION) Satellite Division recognized Dr. Humphreys with this prestigious honor, the highest it bestows, during the ION GNSS+ 2023 conference in Denver.” For more details, visit the Inside GNSS article here, the award page from ION here, or an news article from the ASE department at UT Austin here. A video of the hints given before the recipient was announced can be viewed here. Congratulations to Dr. Humphreys!

September 2023: A paper written by the RNL’s Zach Clements titled “Dual-Satellite Geolocation of Terrestrial GNSS Jammers from Low Earth Orbit” got published in Inside GNSS. “In the past decade, there has been a sharp increase in GNSS outages due to deliberate GNSS jamming. Receivers in LEO are uniquely situated to detect, classify and geolocate terrestrial GNSS jammers. This article explores two-step and direct geolocation of terrestrial GNSS jammers from LEO. In our paper titled “Dual-Satellite Geolocation of Terrestrial GNSS Jammers from Low Earth Orbit” we were able to detect and geolocate over 30 GNSS jammers across Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Ukraine, and Israel with pinpoint accuracy.” The publication, selected as the cover story of Inside GNSS+ in September/October 2023, can be found here.

June 2023: RNL member Zach Clements, Todd Humphreys, and Patrick Ellis from Spire Global were awarded the Walter R. Fried Memorial Award for the best overall paper at the 2023 IEEE/ION PLANS conference. Their paper, titled “Dual-Satellite Geolocation of Terrestrial GNSS Jammers from Low Earth Orbit,” presents a comparison of a two-step geolocation method and single-step geolocation method on data captured over the Eastern
Mediterranean. Congratulations to the authors!