Preventing GPS spoofing is hard, but you can at least detect it

Re:Preventing GPS spoofing is hard, but you can at least det... by gruez on Friday September 13, 2019 @11:42PM (#20968795)

>"We've learned how to perceive anomalies between legitimate GNSS signals and spoofed signals by researching the variations in the satellite signals protocol and recognizing the inter-relationships between signal parameters,"

Sounds like a cat and mouse game. It only works because current spoofers are doing it sloppily. It's only a matter of time before the bad guys get their hands on this and use it to eliminate any discrepancies that the spoofers have. It doesn't sound like they found something that can't be spoofed.

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Re:Preventing GPS spoofing is hard, but you can at least det... by amelius on Saturday September 14, 2019 @09:27AM (#20970634)

It seems that the GPS protocol is just too simple, and lacks proper security elements.

An article linked by the article contains an informative section "How GNSS spoofing works", [1]. Excerpt:

> Effectively, if you can transmit to a GPS receiver, you can speak GPS to it and it will trust you. There's no authentication process involved, and you might even be able to MacGyver together a working spoofing device out of a hacked $15 USB-to-VGA adapter. Granted, you could easily wind up with thousands of dollars in fines or even prison time for trying it—but in strictly technical terms, there's very little stopping you.

[1] https://arstechnica.com/cars/2019/06/claims-of-tesla-hack-wi...

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Re:Preventing GPS spoofing is hard, but you can at least det... by GhettoMaestro on Saturday September 14, 2019 @11:26AM (#20971371)

Yeah the civilian signal has no cipher / integrity-checking. The military signals do have those (and it chirps at 10x the rate of the civilian signal).

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Re:Preventing GPS spoofing is hard, but you can at least det... by amelius on Saturday September 14, 2019 @12:02PM (#20971653)

Makes you wonder if nobody considered that an attack of civilian systems could be used strategically in warfare.

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Re:Preventing GPS spoofing is hard, but you can at least det... by GhettoMaestro on Sunday September 15, 2019 @01:39PM (#20978390)

Oh absolutely they do. That's why they reserve the right to turn off the civilian signals in an extreme time of war.

In reality would that happen? Probably not. There are multiple GNSS constellations these days, so just denying GPS is probably not a safe bet (you can buy civilian uBlox chips for $<50 that are tri-band...)

I love reading about the military aspect of GPS. It is really fascinating the use-cases they plan for. Hopefully they never actually are used in such an extreme scenario.

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