this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2023
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Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do (www.vice.com)
submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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Commercial Flights Are Experiencing 'Unthinkable' GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New "spoofing" attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is "highly significant" for airline safety.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago)

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.