GPS spoofing was once considered to be academic, but research is showing how GPS receivers are vulnerable to spoofing attacks. Real world spoofing attempts continue to cause problems around the world, highlighting the need to keep ground based infrastructure modern. This article summarizes Spirent’s investigations into this real-world problem.
According to a February 3rd article from Spirent, “New tests conducted by Spirent in a live sky environment demonstrate that some commercial GPS receiver models can be compromised by spoofing devices at 10m, 50m and 100m distance.
With more sophisticated equipment and a specific target, spoofing can easily occur in ground or air equipment. Without GPS backups, like ground based navigation aids, a bad actor could overcome airborne GPS receivers and cause pilot confusion or worse, flying off course. Maintain a modern ground based backup system is essential for pilots to maintain resilient navigation sources.
The article goes further to state, “The recent emergence of software-defined radios has made spoofing much easier to carry out. By broadcasting a fake GNSS signal at a higher power than the genuine signal, an attacker can force a receiver to lock on to the fake signal and miscalculate its own position. That can have a wide range of consequences, from steering off course to outputting a false timestamp.”