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Writer's pictureDAVID MITLYNG

Weekly Takeaways-September 24,2024

Updated: Oct 3

Theme of the Week

Nightmare at 32,000 Feet Portrait of a frightened man: on a routine flight through Saudi Arabia last December, pilots were startled by an urgent warning "Terrain ahead! Pull up!" Strange; they were flying over coastal Saudi Arabia at an altitude 8000 feet higher than the tallest mountain in the world. A similar event startled an American Airlines pilot "when an alert began blaring “pull up!” as his Boeing 777 passed over Pakistan in March—at an altitude of 32,000 feet, far above any terrain."Fortunately, these pilots recognized these false alarms "stemmed from a kind of electronic warfare that hundreds of civilian pilots encounter each day: GPS spoofing."So begins the new nightmare for anyone flying the unfriendly skies: "fake signals that militaries use to ward off drones and missiles are also permeating growing numbers of commercial aircraft."What was once a rarity has become commonplace. By one estimate there has been a 400% surge in GPS spoofing incidents from a few cases a month "to more than 1,100 in August," spurred by technology to deter drones and missiles in Ukraine and Middle East (see below).But it is also a sign of something even scarier: an over-reliance on a decades-old technology


 

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GPS jamming used to be a relatively common problem because it was so easy that you can easily buy cheap jammers online. Jammers work because they overwhelm your receiver with a stronger signal - an easy feat with GPS, which is 1000 times weaker than a cell phone signal. But jamming is also easy to detect. It is akin to a denial-of-service attack that drops your internet service; there is no doubt that you are off-line.Spoofing, on the other hand, is like a phishing email - much more dangerous, because, at first glance, it looks credible. It works by sending a nearly identical signal to the receiver, modified just enough to change the receiver location or time. It is a wolf in a sheep's clothing - if you aren't paying attention the results can be disastrous.The rampant rise in GPS spoofing is a spillover from the electronic warfare plaguing Eastern Europe and Middle East. And thanks to new hardware, "spoofing is the new jamming...Instead of just jamming the signals and breaking the links with GPS satellites, they're spoon-feeding them false signals."And, unfortunately, these counter-GPS technologies are advancing much faster than GPS.The fundamental problem is that GPS relies on weak RF signals originating from 20,000 km away at a well-known set of frequencies and carrier codes that make them easy prey. It is like trying to protect a package delivered on the exact same route every day. You don't need to block the postal carrier, you can just intercept and swap it out.But there is new entangled photon technology enabled by the Second Quantum Revolution that provides a kind of tracking number that ensures you know it is your package.

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