Researchers “Spoof” GPS to Lead Yacht Off Course

Have you heard the term “GPS spoofing”? It sounds like a joke, but it is quite serious. GPS spoofing is the act of electronically “tricking” a Global Positioning System into giving false information to its users. In other words, spoofing involves deliberately misleading GPS technology users into thinking they are following the right path when, in fact, they are headed in the wrong direction.

This is more critical than the simple irritation that might result from someone realizing his car’s GPS is “out of whack.” If GPS navigation used for air traffic and for oceangoing vehicles were spoofed, crashes could result, vehicles could be led to places where they can be hijacked, and passengers and pilots could lose their lives.

It’s not as easy, though, to spoof GPS as you might think. Global Positioning Systems—even the relatively simple one you use in your car—rely on feedback from satellites orbiting over 12,000 miles above the earth. Each system is designed to give readings based on information from multiple satellites—as many as twenty. So, if only one source is directing the vehicle a different direction and it doesn’t match the way the other satellites are directing, the system discounts the oddball information.

Nonetheless, spoofing can be done—and has been done successfully in an experiment conducted off the Italian coast in June 2013. Todd Humphreys, who serves as assistant professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the University of Texas at Austin, led a team of students on a radio navigation research team in a successful effort to spoof the navigation of a 213-foot super yacht, causing it to veer off course without the crew’s knowledge.

Humphreys and his students created a device that transmitted fake signals to the ship’s antennas, changing the yacht’s GPS readings. Readings indicated that the ship was drifting off course even though it was not. The crew adjusted their course by three degrees to counteract the nonexistent drift, and the yacht ended up on a new trajectory.

The spoofing was done from onboard the yacht with a device that fit inside a box roughly the size of a briefcase, but could have been done from farther away, Humphreys said.

The ramifications of the success of this experiment are obviously far-reaching and raise concerns about potential terrorist activity or large-scale spoofing of systems that are dependent on GPS technology.

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Researchers “Spoof” GPS to Lead Yacht Off Course