Hackers are taking over planes’ GPS — experts are lost on how to fix it

TUCKnTRUCK said:
The ability to deselect sensors is a requirement for certification.
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I don’t mean deselect because it’s acting funny, I’m thinking more we’ve identified motive and means… I’m gonna need the airlines to just stop allowing X/Y…. Pull the following circuit breakers… ok now operate as normal because we need our economic engine to keep churning. An app one by whether state sponsored or an actual state is attempting to derail the normal operational models we depend on. That’s on top of all the other crazy chaos producing crap they will try.

Imagine having to wake up day next week and immediately go back to ground based only Nav ops. Couple days later we see those mass attacks on our scheduling. Few days later all your day based communications can’t be touched because of what’s being pushed through that connection…. What kind of chaos would that cause.

That’s a reality in the true knockdown drag out World War III. They will open the genies bottle and it will literally be a collective shut down if each other, winner is the side that can adapt to archaic analog and get on their feet first.


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Lawman said:
I don’t mean deselect because it’s acting funny, I’m thinking more we’ve identified motive and means… I’m gonna need the airlines to just stop allowing X/Y…. Pull the following circuit breakers… ok now operate as normal because we need our economic engine to keep churning.

Imagine having to wake up day next week and immediately go back to ground based only Nav ops. Couple days later we see those mass attacks on our scheduling. Few days later all your day based communications can’t be touched because of what’s being pushed through that connection…. What kind of chaos would that cause.

That’s a reality in the true knockdown drag out World War III. They will open the genies bottle and it will literally be a collective shut down if each other, winner is the side that can adapt to archaic analog and get on their feet first.


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Yeah, so… ground based nav ops really aren’t an issue. We do just fine with IRS back up by DME/DME position based nav. We can’t use it for an GPS titled approach, but RNAV as long as we have RNP set is still fine.

Most of the major OEM’s prioritize reliability over the newest nice to have- so I’m not really aware of any major FMS platform that’s not equipped with a few levels of fail down redundancy. For example I don’t have any RNP4/10 time limits with 0 GPS inputs. As long as I load a valid position at start up can make a full crossing with nothing space based beyond text messages to gander/shanwick.
 
MikeD said:
Self driving cars are going to be engineered to be self repossessing cars, if the owner doesn’t make their payments.
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Tesla will have internment camps where the car will deposit you for manual labor until the debt is settled. They don’t want the used car back
 
MikeD said:
Self driving cars are going to be engineered to be self repossessing cars, if the owner doesn’t make their payments.
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You joke, but under the “everything as a service” model pretty soon the concept of “paid off” won’t exist, you’ll just have a monthly subscription to your car forever.
 
TUCKnTRUCK said:
Tesla will have internment camps where the car will deposit you for manual labor until the debt is settled. They don’t want the used car back
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That’s because the car will only repossess with the driver inside, and will lock all doors as it heads to the camp. :)
 
MikeD said:
Agreed. And while jamming is fairly easy to deal with, as you say, the spoofing isn’t. There is a term for that, known as Meaconing. Back in the day, we had to file Meaconing, Intrusion, Jamming, Interference (MIJI) reports with the military, if we encountered any of these.
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I don't remember the other jets, as before I got on the bus, not that many had GPS (At the time, 767? On more than half of the fleet - Laser Rings Gyros and that's it, baby! That was actually my first fleet that had GPS ever).

But on the bus products, if there's a growing mismatch between the GPS receivers and the "mix" of other NAV data, the plane freaks out. Very common over New Mexico and annoying when they don't have any NOTAMS about jamming in progress.

One of my friends patents while he was at Honeywell: US Patent for GPS/IRS global position determination method and apparatus with integrity loss provisions Patent (Patent # 5,923,286 issued July 13, 1999) - Justia Patents Search and his paper on using fiber options/laser rings for NAV: https://www.semanticscholar.org/pap...ders/535cbe12108832329b0c6cd1a827ed6d1756f168
 
Bob Ridpath said:
I'm a Luddite here, so please forgive the ignorance.

Wasn't there a time, though, when airplanes circumnavigated the globe somehow based upon pilot and navigational skill without reliance upon GPS and satellites and shi ... stuff? Thinking specifically of Pan Am Clippers and such and-old world crews, but,I know it happened. And no one could hack it🤷‍♂️
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The issue is more that we've compressed airspace. When those Clippers were running around there wasn't any other traffic out there for them to hit, and the downsides of wandering 50 miles off course didn't (generally) involve getting shot down.
 
DE727UPS said:
They used to make crossings with nothing more than INS that wasn't updated. I think the tracks were wider back then.
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The funny thing is laser gyros can actually flight GPS assisted minimums.

Like we’ve done the testing where we pulled circuit breakers and flew a gps unassisted and an assisted in chase a significant distance to simulate what we would need to do. They don’t drift like the INUs of forever ago. Every submarine operating on patrol is essentially doing the same and has been for decades. They update when they can, outside that it’s a couple INUs doing bias comparison. I’m more concerned with drift caused by GPS spoofing than I am by a pair of Doppler updated INUs somehow getting me x meters off of where they think I am.

The question would be if you (the civil world) suddenly had to take GPS out of the equation, how quickly would things come to a screeching halt or at least delay while lawyers and insurance people had their way with the new status quo. It’s indeed safer than what we were doing in the 60s but it would be new and scary.


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Lawman said:
The funny thing is laser gyros can actually flight GPS assisted minimums.

Like we’ve done the testing where we pulled circuit breakers and flew a gps unassisted and an assisted in chase a significant distance to simulate what we would need to do. They don’t drift like the INUs of forever ago. Every submarine operating on patrol is essentially doing the same. They update when they can, outside that it’s a couple INUs doing bias comparison.

The question would be if you suddenly had to take GPS out of the equation, how quickly would things come to a screeching halt or at least delay while lawyers and insurance people had their way with the new status quo. It’s indeed safer than what we were doing in the 60s but it would be new and scary.


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A screeching halt? Dunno. I’m a “corpie” so we make our own rules ;)

Kidding but, losing GPS would have a negligible effect on my day to day, beyond getting lost in the crew car wherever I’ve ended up
 
TUCKnTRUCK said:
A screeching halt? Dunno. I’m a “corpie” so we make our own rules ;)

Kidding but, losing GPS would have a negligible effect on my day to day, beyond getting lost in the crew car wherever I’ve ended up
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Be like those people who end up stranded on some snow covered forest dirt road in the middle of nowhere in their sedan, because the GPS told them to take that completely impassable road as a shortcut to their destination, and they didn’t have the brains to think to themselves “this doesn’t look passable.” :)
 
I wrote a term paper way back in the 90's so I can't remember.

When the government allowed highly-precise GPS positioning to the public, was it that they made the "P Code" accessible to civilians or justndialed down the induced errors algorithm of the "Selective Availability" feature?

I wonder if we could leach off the GLONASS system. My Bad Elf references both GPS and GLONASS but I have no idea if the receivers on my 350 do. I'll have to look but… FCOM be huge AF.
 
derg said:
I wrote a term paper way back in the 90's so I can't remember.

When the government allowed highly-precise GPS positioning to the public, was it that they made the "P Code" accessible to civilians or justndialed down the induced errors algorithm of the "Selective Availability" feature?

I wonder if we could leach off the GLONASS system. My Bad Elf references both GPS and GLONASS but I have no idea if the receivers on my 350 do. I'll have to look but… FCOM be huge AF.
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If you aren’t updating comsec you don’t really have the code.

One of the first mitigations we make selling things like JDAM kits to foreign nations is the ability to simply not give them the code to use them.

All GPS signal is capable of reaching the level of precision accuracy because it’s just physics. We just adjust the dial the day we need it to not work for those of us in the cool kid club. You can create positional ambiguity simply by manipulating the precision of time in the signal.


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