Maritime GPS Navigation at Risk from Jammers and Spoofers

Marine navigation all over the world has increasingly become reliant on global positioning systems or GPS for short, and its Russian, European and Chinese equivalents. So much so, that it would be hard to imagine the vast number of commercial vessels, let alone smaller fishing and pleasure boats being able to go anywhere on the sea without their GPS system working properly.

However, reports are now coming in which point to an increasing and very real risk to GPS systems and therefore, the whole of marine navigation by “jammers” and “spoofers” who, for a small cost, are able to upset the way in which satellite positioning is received and processed.

GPS is a more sophisticated version of earlier satellite navigation (satnav) systems that surfaced in the nineteen seventies. It had its origin in the US military’s need to deploy “seek and destroy” cruise missiles that could locate and blow up an enemy target using a GPS aided detection system buried in their nose cones. The US military kindly allowed its many orbiting position indicating satellites to be used by civilian devices. These were quickly developed for use at sea and, a little later, adapted for widespread use on land as well. From the tiniest fishing dinghy to the largest oil tanker, from family cars to taxis and buses, and from gliders to passenger aeroplanes, the GPS system lets people know wherever they are on the surface of the planet.

Lighthouse © Stuart Monk - Fotolia.com

In the early days of GPS, the system was used with some caution and mariners still learnt the traditional craft of navigation with compass and sextant. The fear was that the US military would switch off the signal from the satellites in the event of perceived conflict, making all navigation immediately inoperable. The fears were, for the most part, unrealised. Apart from a few scares, no collisions or shipwrecks are known so far to have been caused by a disappearing signal, although many vessels have gone aground or sunk as a result of too heavy a dependence on electronic GPS navigation without the use of a corresponding use of common sense.

Now the danger lies in simple technology which apparently almost anybody with a head for electronic communication coupled with a few hundred euros could devise or simply buy online.

“Jammers” are already widely available on the internet and can be bought quite legally, although their use is illegal. Pranksters and gangsters alike have used these jammers to disrupt navigation systems at airports and on busy highways. Criminals have been known to use jammers to deliberately disrupt the GPS systems in trucks in order to be able to hold them up for their valuable contents.

Henry the Navigator at th… C.l. Doughty

Some jammers have much more signal strength than the low level signals emanating from orbiting satellites. A research experiment in the English Channel in 2010 used a low level jammer and discovered that it had remarkable effects on ships traversing the busy waterway between France and England. Reports came in of ships veering suddenly off course from the use of the jammer. Most commercial ships use an automated system to link their GPS with their steering by autopilot, so jammers can potentially have a devastating effect.

Perhaps more potentially dangerous than jammers are the “spoofers”. These are able to create a false GPS signal that can be used to fool anybody reliant on GPS to provide accurate time and location. The technology that makes spoofing possible has only just become available and is not yet widespread, but reports indicate that the components to construct a home made spoofer would cost less than a thousand euros.

Spoofers could be used in all sorts of devious ways to create false positions for illegal fishing boats and even motorists who want to evade fines from traffic infringements to havoc, even in the financial world. Stock exchanges depend now on precise timing for the exchange of stock.

Although, no serious incidents have yet been ascribed to the use of spoofers, an Iranian engineer is reported to have claimed that a US spy drone had been brought down over Iran by a home made spoofer. The report has yet to be confirmed but experts in the field say that is “in the realms of possibility and that is the scary part of the story.”