GPS Spoofing

The 1997 James Bond movie, Tomorrow Never Dies, starts with a British warship straying into Chinese waters (or did it?) and getting sunk by the Chinese Navy in retaliation. How/why did that happen? Because the master villain had overridden the GPS signal and fed in wrong info instead. The technique is called GPS spoofing. Marc Goodman writes in Future Crimes:

“Once again Hollywood was prescient in its vision of future evil.”

 

Fast forward to 2022. Everyone uses GPS. And in GPS we trust. People have driven into the sea, to the wrong city even because hey, how can GPS be wrong? We tend to dismiss such incidents as stupidity of the driver: how could he not use any common sense?

 

Increasingly though, all kinds of agencies use tracking devices on their employees, from trucking companies to delivery firms to taxi companies to police departments. Why? To improve their employees’ productivity, and to increase fuel efficiency. But this makes many employees very uncomfortable. Initially, they tried cutting off the wires or sabotaging the tracking device. They just got into trouble. So they switched to using GPS jammers instead.

 

The problem with these GPS jammers is that their range doesn’t end at one vehicle. On any road, they end up jamming the GPS signal for ten to fifty neighbouring vehicles around them. But it gets a lot worse. And dangerous. Take the New Jersey airport which had installed a new GPS based landing system. Mysteriously, the system would shut down. Cops finally found the culprit: a truck driver’s GPS jammer was also interfering with the airport’s systems.

 

Today, even GPS spoofing – what happened in that Bond movie – is become easier. That’s sending wrong GPS signals as opposed to just jamming signals:

“Emitting phony signals can send an oil tanker into a bridge or an army convoy into enemy territory.”

(If you’re wondering how it can be so easy – don’t it require lot of power to transmit these signals? – well, remember those GPS signals come from satellites in space. Which means the signal is very weak, and thus that much easier to overwhelm).

 

The GPS spoofing incident that blew me away was about this American military drone that was spying on Iran. The Iranians jammed the signals so that the drone lost contact with its pilots back home. In such a scenario, the drone is programmed to fly back home, in this case Afghanistan. Which is what the drone did. Or rather, thought it had done. Instead, it had landed in an Iranian air base! How? The Iranians had spoofed the GPS signal; so the drone had ended up in the wrong place. Or in the right person place, if you are an Iranian.

 

Next time you see something outrageous in a Hollywood movie, think again. It might become true in your lifetime.

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