Report deems Russia a pioneer in GPS spoofing attacks

I would like to think that, having done research on GPS spoofing and being generally interested in GPS, I would have heard of this before if it were routinely done anywhere in the world. It sounds like you don't have this from an online source but from first-hand experience. Did anyone write this up? Is there local news about it perhaps?

Do you know if GLONASS is also being spoofed in these same areas?

And not only there. It seems that they do it for other places that Putin visits for long periods of time. And that can be used to discover those places: https://twitter.com/billbrowder/status/1114288676408836096

> I'm sure if they could have studied US operations without losing their funding they

Is that actually the case?

> The US has always seemed to have better tech

While the US can spend a lot more on its military and has a corresponding lead, the US is mostly focused on offensive technology (like its carrier groups). Russia, being geographically much closer to "enemy" territory, has a much bigger focus on defensive capabilities and excels in many areas. For example the Russian S400 air defense system is usually seen as superior to the American Patriot system.

With GPS spoofing being mostly a defensive technology it seems exactly like the thing Russia would focus on and the US would neglect.

I don't see why the US would want to spoof GPS, given that it runs the constellation, and can just re-enable encryption of high precision data ruining it for everybody but the US Military.

Aren't military drones using the military GPS profile with encrypted messages? Those cannot be easily spoofed, AFAIK.

I work in automotive telematics-

You can always store 'last known location', the rest is math. The military has/will have this.

However this is a non-issue at the moment for auto, and with 5G/autonomous coming out, GPS might be seeing its last useful days in my part.

You can make spoofing harder. Most of these spoofing attacks target off-the-self drone GSP, and don't work against adversary who plan against them.

If you want to spoof more expensive gear, like those used in commercial shipping, you do it gradually. You start by transmitting the correct coordinates and then gradually start to increase the difference between correct and false coordinates. When done gradually, IMU can't detect GPS spoofing.

Unfortunately many otherwise good navigation systems are not doing even the bare minimum to detect spoofing. It's not the cost. Spoofing protection has not been priority.

It depends on what you are doing. ICBMs predate GPS, so for anything flying you can fall back to the old way of comparing terrain height to known maps. This is reliable and a widely-implemented technique (at least in weaponry).

If that's not an option you can use an IMU, but because of errors adding up over time IMUs aren't all that great if you can't calibrate from time to time. Satellites do it by looking at stars, if you're a car you might look at the streets and compare them to maps.

The only things that really have fundamental problems without GPS are ships and anything that flies over water. In any other application GPS is used because it's cheap to implement and reliable, not because it's the only way to do it.

You can (should) throw more sensors with different characteristics at a Kalman filter for enhanced results in the presence of noise. The wiki page is actually excellent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter

In the example presented some of the inputs could include direction finding to local broadcasters, a GLONASS receiver, a heading indicator and distance traveled odometer if we're talking a road vehicle, and many other things limited only by your imagination and resources at hand.

The first acura nav systems were totally gps-free. They used gyros, compass, and speed data from the car, and managed to do pretty well. I imagine a similar system on top of gps and perhaps even cell/wifi/radio data to get near seamless coverage with civ tech.

It depends on the quality of the IMU but yes. All US military systems use ultra-high precision IMUs and will only accept GPS corrections within the (classified) error margins of their inertial measurements. US military-grade IMUs lose precision very slowly, it is an area where they have a huge technology lead over everyone else so (ironically) they are less dependent on GPS than anyone else that might use GPS. Access to state-of-the-art IMU technology is very strictly controlled by the US.

GPS was created in part to allow the US to measure the world precisely enough in peacetime that they have an accurate model to feed their IMUs in wartime. It was never designed to be a robust navigation system even though everyone commonly uses it that way.

Look here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19652414

Tl;dr: nope.

You could technically do this, but such a technology is too expensive to incorporate in civilian use receivers that have to retail for a couple bucks.

Military receivers used by the USA and NATO allies can easily detect spoofing because they listen for signals on separate frequencies reserved for military use, with higher precision. On these frequencies, all traffic is encrypted using a private key that only the DoD has access to (in theory). In this case, it is easy to detect spoofing because your enemy cannot encrypt signals using the DoD's private key (they just don't have it). If the receiver is unable to decrypt the incoming signal (key mismatch), it knows there is something fishy going on. I would also speculate there are additional countermeasures which are not publicly available.

No trying to advocate the devil, but

Kremlin is trianle-like shaped, there's river from one side with bridges at the ends (so it could be counted as a tunnel), Red Square from another (pedestrian only unless you're a member of Victory Parade, one-way streets aside), the third side is surrounded by Mokhovaya street which has 5 intersections with others and you can get to the one you'd want if you've skipped your turn.

Does Galileo work somehow differently as opposed to GPS?

TLDR: no.

GPS spoofing can be done as a replay attack; record the signal at the airport, rebroadcast at the Kremlin louder than the direct satellite signal and voilà, your receiver says you’re at the airport.

As it’s just a replay attack of the original signal, encryption can’t help.

>people read and accept this capability without question

These days most negative statements about Russia are accepted at face value.

Yeah, all those military ships having accidents with civilian ships does seem a bit weird, eh?

It would be crazy to operate ships solely with GPS data.

This does not follow. The US Navy uses very high-precision inertial navigation systems, networks of them embedded throughout the ship and measuring position independently in fact (think wisdom of crowds). External corrections are only accepted within the very small aggregate drift error. Spoofing GPS will do almost nothing to a US Navy ship, that isn't how they navigate. Hanlon's Razor applies.

The US military is very, very good at exotic inertial measurement technology, doubly so for a platform like a ship with few power/weight limitations. It is a cornerstone of their technology advantage.