[time-nuts] Ships fooled in GPS spoofing attack suggest Russian cyberweapon

[Bob kb8tq]

Hi

Setting up the signals for any time / location on earth is simply  matter of 
a few mouse clicks with any of a number of packages. No need to do anything
more than that to get the data. 

Bob

> On Aug 14, 2017, at 3:02 PM, Graham / KE9H <ke9h.graham at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Remember the military drone that the Iranians tricked into landing in Iran
> a few years ago?
> 
> The best explanation I heard of how they did it was that they knew that if
> it lost its command channel, that it would return to the airport where it
> took off.
> 
> So, what they did was spoof the GPS with a signal that said it was 150
> miles further east than it actually was, then jam the control channel, and
> it set down nicely on the airport it came from, except that it was the
> desert in IRAN with a few rocks that ripped up its landing gear, and not
> its home runway.
> 
> Would this spoof be as easy as recording the real signal and playing it
> back (louder) delayed by about 120 seconds? (Assuming you want to shift
> things to the East.) (Also assume you have a relatively unsophisticated GPS
> nav receiver.)
> 
> --- Graham
> 
> ==
> 
> On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 1:41 PM, Bob kb8tq <kb8tq at n1k.org> wrote:
> 
>> Hi
>> 
>>> On Aug 14, 2017, at 2:13 PM, Chris Albertson <albertson.chris at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>> 
>>> The trouble with spoofing location is that in theory every ship is using
>>> more than one method of navigation.   They would notice their GPS is
>> acting
>>> up and turn it off.
>> 
>> In most cases the “other method” is dead reckoning. That’s actually being
>> generous. There are a *lot* of cases every year where the answer is that
>> the vessel is on GPS autopilot with nobody at all on watch. Yes the
>> results of
>> breaking the law are fairly predictable. Actually having a competent
>> navigator
>> on duty all the time running “alternate” data, that costs money …..
>> 
>> Bob
>> 
>>> 
>>> I'm far from a professional but I've taken the  six week class and I'm
>>> reasonably certain I could find a place on the other side of the pacific
>>> ocean with no GPS.   The GPS is far easier to use and more accurate but
>> no
>>> one uses just GPS alone, they alway compare several methods.
>>> 
>>> On Mon, Aug 14, 2017 at 10:12 AM, Clint Jay <cjaysharp at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>> I guess it would depend on the level of infrastructure available to the
>>>> attacker, clock distribution is a reasonably well solved problem isn't
>> it?
>>>> 
>>>> There would, I suppose also be the issue of receiver swamping, you could
>>>> monitor received signal levels as it's my understanding that the signals
>>>> from the satellites are weak enough that they're indiscernible from
>> noise
>>>> floor without some rather complex processing?
>>>> 
>>>> Authentication via signing could be another feasible way to prevent
>>>> spoofing except we are potentially talking about interference from state
>>>> actors who may even be the very people who run one of the satellite
>>>> networks
>>>> 
>>>> On 14 Aug 2017 5:51 pm, "Attila Kinali" <attila at kinali.ch> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>>> On Mon, 14 Aug 2017 12:09:43 -0400
>>>>> Tim Shoppa <tshoppa at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> I think if you are only trying to spoof a single receiver it would be
>>>>>> possible to walk a spoofed time/space code in a way that time moved
>>>>> without
>>>>>> so obvious of a discontinuity. I'm sure there would be effects a
>>>> time-nut
>>>>>> could notice still.
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not really. Unless you have a multi-antenna setup (see jim's email),
>>>>> you have nothing to compare the signal to. Even an ideal reference
>>>>> clock in your GPS receiver does not help, as the attacker could be
>>>>> tracking you in such a way that you will never see a discontinuity
>>>>> in time or position and that all the other sanity checks you do
>>>>> still don't show anything.
>>>>> 
>>>>> With a two antenna setup, you can already check whether the phases
>>>>> add up to what you expect them to be, given your position relative
>>>>> to the satellites position. You do not need 3 antennas as a potential
>>>>> attacker can spoof the phase of some satellites correctly, but not
>>>>> of all at the same time. This at least gives you a spoof/no-spoof
>> signal.
>>>>> 
>>>>> With an antenna array you can do some masking of spoofers (ie placing
>>>>> a null where the spoofer comes from). But this increases the cost and
>>>>> complexity of the system super-linear with the number of antennas.
>>>>> Maybe one way to do it, would be to use a single receiver with a stable
>>>>> reference clock and switch between antennas in short succession. Ie
>>>> similar
>>>>> to how the early single channel GPS receivers worked, but for antennas
>>>>> instead of SVs. But I have no idea how easy/difficult this would be
>>>>> to do and how well it would work against spoofers.
>>>>> 
>>>>>                               Attila Kinali
>>>>> --
>>>>> It is upon moral qualities that a society is ultimately founded. All
>>>>> the prosperity and technological sophistication in the world is of no
>>>>> use without that foundation.
>>>>>                -- Miss Matheson, The Diamond Age, Neil Stephenson
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>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
>>> --
>>> 
>>> Chris Albertson
>>> Redondo Beach, California
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