Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

Re:Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyber... by stuff4ben on Sunday August 13, 2017 @12:02PM (#15003412)

If you RTFA, you'll note that jamming is different than spoofing. And no it doesn't make me feel relieved that the military "is on top of this". Whose military? Why should we trust them? State actors with the capability to spoof GPS signals can do much harm to even their own citizens.

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Re:Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyber... by GrumpyYoungMan on Sunday August 13, 2017 @12:27PM (#15003520)

> If you RTFA, you'll note that jamming is different than spoofing.

Military GPS signals (P-code and future M-code) are encrypted, so spoofing is somewhat less of a concern for the military. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Precision_code and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPS_signals#Military_.28M-code...

Outside of the military, both academia and industry are well aware of the potential for spoofing of civilian GNSS signals and have been developing proof of concept attacks and countermeasures for quite some time. See, for example, http://gpsworld.com/inexpensive-hack-spoofs-gps-in-smartphon... and https://www.ion.org/publications/abstract.cfm?articleID=1478...

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Re:Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyber... by lfam on Sunday August 13, 2017 @12:16PM (#15003457)

It's not comforting, indeed.

But you should know that the various space-based positioning systems (GPS, GLONASS, BeiDou etc) are deployed and administered by the respective governments of their countries of origin. They were invented for the military and can be selectively disabled or degraded for civilian users.

Does anyone think it's possible for non-governments to stand up replacements for these systems, from either a technical or legal / political perspective?

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Re:Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyber... by jdavis703 on Sunday August 13, 2017 @12:42PM (#15003601)

It'd be very easy to make a law outlawing high-resoluton satellite positioning systems. All lawmakers would need to claim is it was a national security issue that terrorists could use blah blah.

From a technical perspective it's not hard at all, but corporations are probably leery of launching (no pun intended) such a business.

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Re:Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyber... by ChuckMcM on Sunday August 13, 2017 @12:38PM (#15003576)

In the case of using the encrypted GPS I would guess that spoofing would look like jamming. Basically if you were getting a GPS signal and it wasn't encrypted correctly you would consider it invalid but you're probably not seeing the real satellites because you're seeing the spoof signal. The net result being you are seeing no GPS signal you can trust. That reduces down to the previously solved problem of operating with no GPS at all.

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Re:Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyber... by gaius on Sunday August 13, 2017 @01:18PM (#15003807)

Whose military?

If you "RTFA" you will observe that OFCOM is the UK regulator.

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