GPS World, January 2014

EXPERT ADVICE The Low Cost of Protecting America Dana A Goward H ighly precise and free for use by anyone with an inexpensive receiver GPS and other GNSS are great Their navigation and timing signals have been incorporated into nearly every aspect of modern life from synchronizing power grids to financial systems the Internet telecommunications and transportation The U S Department of Homeland Security estimates that these signals are used by all 16 of U S critical national infrastructure sectors and are essential to the functioning of 11 Jamming Threat Growing When these faint signals cant be received people start to feel the impact immediately Usually outages have minimal impact because they are localized and shortlived Often they occur because the user is temporarily in an area without a good view of the sky More and more often though they are due to the presence of one of a growing number of people with jamming devices many of which also block cell phone frequencies Inexpensive easy to obtain and illegal jammers are spreading as people become more concerned about privacy and being tracked by their employer spouse the National Security Agency and others Although the government tries to collect information on jamming incidents no widespread detection system has been established and few verbal reports are received For the calls that do come in it is often impossible to determine which are because of user error and which are purposeful interference For those cases where jamming is discovered locating and identifying the perpetrator is difficult and often impossible As one example in spite of near daily disruption of GPS that caused the shutdown of a new landing system at Newark International Airport it took the Federal Aviation Administration and the If a navigation satellite outage became widespread and lasted more than a few hours because of a major solar flare software problem hacker or cyberattack most authorities agree that the impacts would be catastrophic Federal Communications Commission more than two years of concerted effort to identify the single perpetrator If a navigation satellite outage became widespread and lasted more than a few hours because of a major solar flare software problem hacker or cyberattack most authorities agree that the impacts would be catastrophic While much of the information is classified we do know that transportation would immediately become much less efficient and more dangerous even many traffic lights are coordinated using satellite timing Telecommunications financial energy and other systems would soon begin to fail as their back up timing systems lost synchronization with each other Power grids would lose synchronizations and outages may occur as transmission points became overloaded More than speculation these problems have been documented in academic papers proven in government tests in the United States and the United Kingdom and the early stages of such impacts have been observed in localized and short term outages in the United States Most dramatically they have been demonstrated by North Koreas intentional jamming of South Korea Spoofing Of equal concern is the problem of spoofing The worlds preeminent ethical spoofer of satellite navigation receivers Todd Humphreys of the University of Texas Austin has demonstrated how easy it is to take control of unmanned aircraft and ships on autopilot by sending a slightly stronger navigation signal making the receiver think it is somewhere other than where it is Iran claims to have done something similar capturing a U S military drone in 2010 Humphreys has also shown on paper how time stamps on automated financial transactions could be altered through spoofing This could do things like reverse the buy sell equation at a stock exchange allowing someone to sell at a higher price before buying at a lower one The Government Solution What is to be done The challenges have been extensively documented and discussed since at least the 1990s In 2004 President Bush issued the National Space Policy NSPD 39 that addressed the problem Although portions of it are still classified contained within the publically releasable section was direction for the U S Department of Transportation DOT to in coordination with the Department Homeland Security DHS develop acquire operate and maintain backup position navigation and timing capabilities that can support critical transportation homeland security and other critical civil and commercial infrastructure applications within the United States in the event of a disruption of space based GPS World January 2014 www gpsworld com 8