Spoofing Risks Prompt Military to Update GPS Devices.

• Author: Lee, Connie

In 2011, Iranian citizens turned on their televisions to find the media zeroed in on a CIA drone allegedly captured by electronic warfare specialists who redirected the GPS coordinates of the system.

This was the first potential major incident of GPS interference on a U.S. government device, according to Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. The following year, a professor at the University of Texas successfully redirected a government drone when challenged to do so by the Department of Homeland Security.

Being susceptible to spoofing and jamming is a risk of using GPS signals, Goward said. A signal can be "spoofed" by being replaced with false or misleading information, whereas jamming involves stopping or disrupting a signal. However, quantifying and verifying the number of these attempts can be difficult because perpetrators often aim to operate undetected, he noted.

The alleged CIA drone incident was the "coming out party" that brought these navigation risks to light, Goward said. Since then, there have been other episodes as well. The U.S. Maritime Administration in June 2017 reported that 20 ships in the Black Sea may have been victims of GPS interference. The Coast Guard has also announced experiencing potential jamming episodes.

However, technology has advanced to the point where state actors are no longer the only ones who are able to perform such operations, Goward noted. Now, it has trickled down to the "consumer bad guy level," meaning that non-state actors can easily purchase the necessary equipment to interfere with GPS signals, he said.

Todd Humphreys, the professor who completed the challenge from the Department of Homeland Security, noted that it's now possible to download the codes to generate spoofing signals from the internet.

"You can download a code that has been developed by a Chinese researcher and a Japanese researcher... and put this onto [a] commercial-off-the-shelf radio frequency generation device," he said.

Although the U.S. military still has GPS equipment that is more resilient than the average commercial device, they tend to be classified and "fairly difficult to use," Goward said.

"We understand that folks in the military don't use their military GPS equipment because it's just a pain in the butt," he said. Sometimes this leads to practices such as using commercial-off-the-shelf GPS devices rather than the required systems, he noted.

"Even though...