Now That's Mean!

When you travel--and get lost--as much as I do, you quickly learn that the most useful tool you can have is anything that uses GPS. Knowing where you think you're at and knowing where you're actually at are two different things in a city where you don't speak the local language enough to ask for directions. That's why it takes a really mean-spirited person to intentionally give you wrong directions.

Not that Paul Kintner and Mark Psiaki are mean spirited. In real life, Kintner and Psiaki are professors at Cornell University, and it's been my experience that anyone associated with Cornell is okay. But that still doesn't explain why they'd have so much fun spoofing GPS receivers. Of course, I'm sure they'd tell you that it's not fun--it's serious research. Which is why their description of what they do is described in a paper with the title of Simulating Ionosphere-Induced Scintillation for Testing GPS Receiver Phase Tracking Loops, instead of something like "GPS Spoofing for Fun and Profit."

Along with fellow researchers Brent Ledvina and Todd Humphreys, the team has described how a "phony" receiver could be placed in the proximity of a navigation device, where it would track, modify, and retransmit the signals being transmitted from the GPS satellite constellation. Gradually, the "victim" navigation device takes the fake navigation signals for the real thing.

By demonstrating the vulnerability of receivers to spoofing, researchers at the GPS Lab believe they can help devise methods to guard against such attacks. Right, and maybe get a chuckle out of seeing me walking north when I think I'm going south.

-- Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 05:04 PM  Permalink