A $225 GPS spoofer can send sat-nav-guided vehicles into oncoming traffic

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2018/07/a-225-gps-spoofer-can-send-autonomous-vehicles-into-oncoming-traffic/

by jsoc815 • 8 years ago

65 48 8 years ago

arstechnica.com

matthewmacleod• 8 years ago

While the whole thing is interesting (mostly because of the design of the spoofer rather than it being anything else that's new) this headline is deliberately misleading.

Robotbeat4• 8 years ago

this headline is deliberately misleading.

I see what you did there... ;)

xPhobophobia• 8 years ago

And the conclusion has been the same for a while. GPS-only NAV is very susceptible to degradation. Blended solutions are the only path forward with GPS.

jaimex2• 8 years ago

I remember reading the Kremlin has a high powered version of this mocking the airport co-ordinates so drones would not fly in its airspace.

lawlessone• 8 years ago

mocking the airport co-ordinates

Sounds very dangerous. If an aircraft was landing in poor visibility they could use that to make t crash.

baq• 8 years ago

does ILS use GPS?

red75prime• 8 years ago

Airports use ILS with their own guiding antenna arrays and their own frequencies. At least this particular airport should.

oh_sigh• 8 years ago

The aircraft would have to be within a few hundred foot bubble of Central Moscow in order to receive the spoofed signal. There are already major problems if an airplane picks up that spoofed signal and tries to land based on it.

walrus01• 8 years ago

yes, a number of people have seen their smartphones when near the kremlin show coordinates of one of moscow's airports, such as seen here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRlxSF5bwTI

ourmandave• 8 years ago

Could be used on self-driving vehicles like the giant dump trucks in quarries, or harvesters in corn fields?

What about autonomous trains? Cause that would off the rails.

Robotbeat4• 8 years ago

A $10 steel bar can derail a train.

randomsearch3• 8 years ago

Easier to protect a train line than all the roads in a country (and indeed, they are often protected). No physical trespass required, remote activated.

Robotbeat4• 8 years ago

Except rail lines aren’t protected, and couldn’t feasibly be protected. An autonomous car could easily be protected from this simply by using local sensors for collision avoidance, which I think is the norm, as opposed to what this headline misleadingly (heh) suggests.

Edit: Relevant XKCD. Causing crashes isn’t hard period. https://m.xkcd.com/1958/

soziawa2• 8 years ago

Is it also easier to protect all train lines in the country? It seems a bit foolish to compare a single train line to all roads instead of all train lines to all roads.

athenot2• 8 years ago

Really? $10 won't buy you much in terms of steel. You'd probably need a lot more than just a crowbar. I'm not saying trains are invulnerable to debris on the tracks, just that they are designed to handle small stuff on the tracks.

Robotbeat4• 8 years ago

A crowbar well-placed/used is sufficient.

IshKebab• 8 years ago

A crowbar is not "small stuff on the tracks". Have you ever seen a train?

Faaak• 8 years ago

10$ is around 10kg of steel. With that, you can make a crude derailer and easily (and I mean it) derail a train.

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

Stop shopping at the hardware store and go to an actual steel supplier. If you don't need a lot of material then don't be picky and just by a drop to avoid a cut fee (and revise your design for whatever material you get).

detaro• 8 years ago

previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17539465

direct link to paper: https://people.cs.vt.edu/gangwang/sec18-gps.pdf

jsoc815• 8 years ago

Thanks, missed the previous post.

wongarsu• 8 years ago

A $225 GPS spoofer can send sat-nav-guided vehicles into oncoming traffic *

* by fooling the vehicle into driving the wrong way through a one-way street.

That's a serious asterisk. I think there are much more interesting worst-case applications for this, like kidnapping, randsom, misdirecting emergency responders etc. Some of those are mentioned by the article, but the headline just causes doubt and disappointment.

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

I agree

Google/Apple/whatever directions send delivery vehicles down roads with under-height structures all the time and they rarely get can-opened. GPS directions are inaccurate enough in urban environments that people have to pay enough attention for this attack to not work very well. People will generally defer to the local signage when it comes to which lane you need to be in for a turn and which way you can't drive down a street or how tall a bridge actually is.

keymone8• 8 years ago

considering that GPS has civilian and military parts of the signal, are the messages not signed by, i don't know, U.S. military or something? how come it is easy to spoof?

karthikb• 8 years ago

The military signal is encrypted and on a different band. Only the military has access to that signal.

keymone8• 8 years ago

right, but they could've went the extra meter and just sign all outgoing payloads?

Nokinside• 8 years ago

Obviously sat-nav guided systems should not rely on unprotected satellite navigation alone. You need complementary systems.

EU's GNSS has PRS (Public Regulated Service) is authenticated and can be used in sensitive applications for civilian uses. US has GPS modes that are protected but they seem to be only for military.

There is also Wide Area Augmentation System (WAAS) and European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS). They augment GPS/Golnass and Galileo and provide integrity and more accuracy.

Typically new sat-nav systems have multi-constellation capability and they can receive from from GPS/GNSS/Golnass. Even new smartphones have that capability. Of course, if all of them are unprotected, you can spoof them all parallel.

ccnafr• 8 years ago

Duplicate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17539465

A $225 GPS spoofer can send sat-nav-guided vehicles into oncoming traffic

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