Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 421 points –
Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do
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Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New "spoofing" attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is "highly significant" for airline safety.

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Fucking serves them right, the aviation industry have been buying GPS devices for decades that bleed outside and don't explicitly filter down to their spectrum. There was a satellite internet startup in the US that went through the whole process, bought its spectrum and was ready to launch, then the aviation industry complained and had them shut down because their devices were all shit and "it would be too difficult to change everyone's equipment".

Do you have something I can read about this? It's a little vague, so hard for me to search, and it sounds like something I would be interested in. Thanks

Pretty sure this is the story, rings true to my memory of the company name starting with "L": https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/04/lightsquared-broadband-a-threat-to-gps/

Although this article doesn't cover how the GPS systems used cheap filtering circuits that didn't adequately filter out adjacent frequencies. This was done purely to save money, because there wasn't anything using the adjacent frequencies. As a result, LightSquared went bankrupt in 2012.

Thanks I'll give it a read.

Edited my last comment, I don't think that article goes into much detail. It only really covers the objections by GPS device manufacturers against LightSquared, not the technical aspect ie poor filtering by cheap GPS devices.

This article covers LightSquared's claims of poor filtering by GPS devices: https://www.networkworld.com/article/696602/wireless-lightsquared-says-gps-makers-ignored-filtering-rules.html

This article also covers some of it: https://www.cnet.com/tech/mobile/lightsquared-blew-it-and-heres-why/

TL;DR GPS devices cut corners, however because they were established and so endemic across the industry, there was no practical way to fix them all and LightSquared was sent down the toilet.

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