this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
427 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
60044 readers
2888 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Nope. And more importantly, it looks like nobody considered what might happen if the signal gets spoofed. The backup systems that are supposed to keep working if GPS breaks also break due to these spoofed signals.
GPS is encrypted, it's just that the US military won't share the encryption keys so the rest of us have to use the unencrypted channels. They've clearly thought about it and decided against making it public.
If they shared the encryption keys, then it wouldn't be safe from spoofing anymore. The whole point of encryption is to not share the keys.
Also, before someone tries to point out PKI, the satellites don't use PKI. So that's not relevant. You can't share the current keys without jeopardizing the system.
PKI? I assume you mean asymmetric encryption? That's been available long before the GPS system was launched. Why do you think it isn't relevant? They could have designed it into the protocol if they wanted to.
The military didn't design it for civilian use. That's really all there is to it. The commenter I was replying to made it sound like theres an easy solution here. There isn't.
I'm the commenter you originally replied to. If the US military wanted unspoofable GPS available to everyone then it would be available to everyone. They only want the public to have unencrypted GPS, so that's all we get.
The military is as concerned with civilian gps as much as they are with anything else that isn't military-related: not their issue to solve. They won't stop anyone from using encrypted gps. They really won't. The only branch in the us that actively tries to prevent public encryption is the NSA. (Even then, they wouldn't block something like gps). For the record, I'm a security engineer (DDI, private sector), previously worked for the DOD, and used to work in satcom.