B (9:48)

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A (11:58)

Dave Buettner and I recently sat down with Brandon Karpf, friend of the show, as we discussed maritime GPS jamming and spoofing. Here's our conversation.

B (12:08)

It is my pleasure to welcome Brandon Karpf to the show. He is the leader for International Public Private Partnerships at ntt. Brandon, welcome.

C (12:17)

Thank you. Always good to be here, Dave.

B (12:18)

And of course Maria Vermazes, host of the T Minus Space Daily podcast. Maria, thank thanks for having me, Dave.

A (12:27)

Glad to be here. And I'm Brandon.

B (12:29)

You are a graduate of the US Naval Academy and as such have actually spent time out at sea. So our topic today is GPS maritime spoofing and what we're seeing around the world when it comes to our adversaries taking advantage of the GPS system and their ability to jam it or block it or do the things they want to do. Can I just start with you Brandon? For folks who aren't familiar with GPS and the reliance of it from folks at sea, how would you describe that?

C (13:04)

Yeah, sure. So from. From a high level, right? Starting with what is this thing that we all do rely on and every aspect of our daily lives and economy today relies on this brilliant innovation from the US military developed around the 1970s that was really designed to drop a precision guided munition on Moscow during the Cold War.

B (13:28)

Not to put too fine a point.

C (13:30)

On it, which was the whole point of this.

A (13:33)

That's why it's always great talking to you, Brandon. Just get right to it.

C (13:37)

And then the private sector started realizing, hey, we can do a lot with this. And early days gps, the resolution was down to a few meters. And then over the last 20 years, the US military opened up more reserve frequencies that allowed our iPhones to geolocate us to within really centimeters. You know, incredibly high fidelity location that has opened up literally, I mean literally trillions of dollars of economic value have been attributed to gps. So talk about a great investment for the government to, for the US government to put, you know, into the economy. We've literally gained trillions of dollars. But when it comes to specific areas of the economy, you think any sort of transportation, whether it's aviation or mar, having the ability to precisely geolocate where you are on earth to navigate around things like hurricanes or typhoons or things like sea state, that is that, you know, is beyond the capabilities of your ship to do things like autonomous navigation, where you now have ships who are pretty much, you know, these days, the large maritime trade ships pretty much drive themselves. You know, they have a small crew who are there to really bring it in and out of port. Other than that, these ships really kind of just drive themselves. All of that relies on and requires the accurate GPS signals from our position, navigation and timing satellites.

B (15:05)

And Maria, on the space side of things, that's what we're talking about here. This is a constellation of satellites, right?

A (15:11)

Well, there are several different ones. GPS is the US owned one. I'm sure Brandon was going to get to that. But there are many different ones. Galileo is famously the one that Europe has and China has its own. And I'm sure there's others that I'm forgetting and there's always more being added, but they're sort of in the industry just called either PNT position navigation and timing, as Brandon said, or GNSS is another one, sort of as the generic. But often when you say gps, people know what you mean, so yeah, but there are a lot and there are going to be increasingly more because many global economies are realizing that these are extraordinarily valuable and they're being increasingly tied to many different markets where you might not in ways you might not expect. I'm always surprised to find where else it's turning up and what else is totally dependent on these satellites being accessible and working correctly.

B (15:59)

So let's talk about the implications for the maritime industry and indeed the military. I mean, we've got, as you say, Brandon, these ships that are relying on gps, but it is evidently easy or not too hard to jam or spoof, which can throw ships off course.

C (16:21)

Yeah, most definitely. The signal characteristics themselves are actually incredibly basic. And just with some commercial off the shelf technology, you can replicate specifically a GPS signal. And again, as Maria mentioned, there are multiple different constellations. All of them have their own signal characteristics. But the GPS signal itself is an incredibly low power signal. It's not very complex in terms of the modulation. It uses a very basic form of modulation. So again, this is something that you could probably buy maybe $50 of off the shelf equipment and create a spoofed GPS signal. In fact, I've even heard of some companies who are doing precision robotics doing this inside their own labs of spoofing these signals or replicating these signals, which is technically illegal.

A (17:08)

Technically illegal.

C (17:11)

But it's so easy to do that when you need to create some sort of robot laboratory. You can really do it with literally probably about $50 of equipment. Now, the problem there is that not only, you know, are our military ships and equipment, and by the way, you know, we didn't mention, but military ships heavily reliant on gps, not just, you know, where you are, but also deconflicting where you are with other ships, but also your munitions. As we talked about the original intent of gps, these days, smart munitions all rely on gps. And so what you're seeing is increasing incidents of GPS spoofing and jamming, which are different things. And we could talk about the difference there, but GPS spoofing and jamming really kind of took off by the Russians in the Eastern Mediterranean during the conflict in Syria in the late mid to late 2010s, has really expanded in the war in Ukraine, around the Black Sea and Ukraine. We've seen it in the western Pacific around Taiwan and even in some of the straits like the Straits of Malacca. And we are starting to see it in areas like the Red Sea, the Straits of Hormuz, et cetera. And even recently some reports of manipulated GPS signals off the coast of Venezuela.

B (18:21)

We've heard rumors of whenever Vladimir Putin is on board of a ship, on board a ship, they spoof that ship's location. So I guess to make it a more difficult target to find or something like that.

C (18:36)

Short, certainly. And his dacha in the, the, the mountains of Russia, similarly, you know, no GPS signals will work anywhere near that location. And we have seen this, of course, with foreign, foreign leaders or dictators who understand how easy it is to manipulate these signals, but also how much the US and US allies rely on these for our military intelligence operations and how pretty much everything we have today in terms of those more technical operations rely on an accurate geolocated signal. And so, you know, right now this is starting to occur regularly. And as I mentioned, it's pretty inexpensive and easy to do this.

A (19:22)

Brandon, can I ask you to walk us through the different modes of jamming or spoofing? Because I think we often, and I know I often get confused and when I read various, you know, mainline news stories about some. Some person doing something with a Bluetooth device to do something to gps, and I'm going, well, what exactly happened there? And if my understanding is there's actually a couple different ways to achieve this and they all kind of be a little bit different, so can you walk us through them?

C (19:47)

Sure. So the, the first I'll talk about is really kind of the least sophisticated form of jamming, which is really just putting a whole bunch of noise out into the atmosphere. So imagine you and I are having kind of like a little whispered conversation and then someone else just turns on a radio super loud and you can't hear yourself think. That is barrage jamming. That is just the simplest form of jamming. You're just putting so much noise into the atmosphere that whoever's trying to receive the correct signal can't really hear the right signal, can't distinguish the signal for the noise. And that's the simplest form, really easy to generate that. And you're just putting a whole bunch of energy out there into the world. There are techniques for getting around that. Again, that's relatively unsophisticated. And so there are some interesting modulation techniques that you can actually still extract the signal from that kind of a noise. But that is still a very effective technique. And when it comes to gps, you're just denying the availability of a user of gps. No one's going to have GPS there. Now, a little more sophisticated is when you talk about more spot jamming, which is if you know the frequencies that someone is going to communicate on, which GPS is an open standard now, everyone knows those frequencies, even if it's moving frequencies, you can, instead of putting out just noise across the whole spectrum, put out noise specifically over those frequencies. And in that way, you're actually being much more efficient with the energy that you need and the resources you need to jam. And you're being much more effective in terms of jamming the specific frequencies being used by whatever user. But still jamming, you're just denying availability of that signal for someone to collect on it. Now, the Much more sophisticated type is actual GPS spoofing. And GPS spoofing is where you actually copy the GPS signal itself. You copy the modulation, you copy the frequencies, you copy the power level that someone expects to see. Because devices are actually pretty smart and there are ways of seeing, okay, this signal I'm receiving seems too powerful. And so let's just ignore it or filter it out. And so a really effective, sophisticated GPF spoofer is going to copy that modulation, copy the frequency, copy the power level, and replicate that out into the environment and give you just a slight timing delay. And really, that's how the GPS signals work. It's looking at the timing between you and multiple satellites, you and multiple satellite transponders. And if, if an adversary is spoofing that signal and slowly introduces a timing offset and slowly increases that timing offset over time, you're gonna, the adversary is gonna pull your GPS location away from where it's supposed to be, manipulating where you think you are in the world.

A (22:28)

That's so cool.

C (22:30)

I hate that.

A (22:31)

That's my reaction. Like, that's so smart.

C (22:33)

Oh, and you can look up, you can look up, I mean, open source, you know, GitHub, repos that do this, you know, algorithms that do this, you know, any sort of software defined radio has the ability to do this.

B (22:45)

So one of the potential perils here that I've seen covered is that an adversary can, as you say, lure a ship away from, say, an international shipping lane into an area where they shouldn't be, therefore giving that adversary an excuse to board that ship or fire upon it.

C (23:05)

Certainly. Right. And when you think about maritime, every country who has coastal regions has this thing called an exclusive economic zone, and then this thing called territorial waters. Your exclusive economic zone is within 200 nautical miles of your coast, and then territorial waters is within 12 nautical miles of your coast. Certainly military operations are very sensitive not to infringe upon that 12 nautical miles. Foreign nation military ships are not allowed to transit within 12. That, you know, that, that territorial waters of a foreign nation without being invited. But that exclusive economic zone is really, you know, gives that nation, you know, the nation permission to do their, their fishing and mining and oil drilling, etc. Without being infringed upon. And so certainly the GPS spoofing would affect that. Right, would affect a military's ability like ours, who's doing something like a freedom of navigation operation, which is where we move a ship between say Taiwan and mainland China and say, this is a free economic zone. Anyone can transit here. We are, we are participating in that freedom of navigation operation. But, but if the GPS signals are spoofed in that area, it makes the US military much more concerned that we might accidentally infringe upon the territorial waters of a foreign nation. So they might be more sensitive to that or pull further away. Also, just accurate navigation. Right. Ships are navigating based on charts and shoal waters and other potential hazards, and not having confidence in where you are creates a massive amount of risk that these ships might just not accept.

A (24:42)

Brandon, when you were describing just the, the jamming and spoofing techniques, the, the thought that I had was we often shorthand talk about these satellite hacking problems and it's, it sounds like yet again, it's really more a terminal, a ground terminal thing is my read on that. Correct? I mean, what is the mitigation here for, you know, somebody who's dealing with this in the, in, you know, contested waters or whatnot?

C (25:07)

Yeah, it is kind of a terminal, right? Because you jam a receiver, not a transmitter, right? When you jam something or spoof something, you are spoofing or jamming against the receiver, not the transmitter. The GPS constellation is just a whole bunch of transponders in medium earth orbit. So, yeah, I mean, the problem is that the protocol itself, right, the modulation, the technology is so fundamental that it's just so easy to replicate. But even if you did something much more complex, and it could still be hacked, you can manipulate a cell signal using CDMA pretty easily. You see that all the time with the cellular collection, stingrays and things like that. That's even a more complex signal that's pretty easy to spoof. So there are these things called navigation message authentications, which essentially think of it like a digital signature where you can maybe like sign the signal, but that requires the receiver to have a little more processing power. And so you're putting a tax on the terminal, on the receiver to actually do some calculation to take some CPU time to authenticate these messages. Really, that's, to me, really kind of the only solution here. You know, those, you know, digital signatures using kind of the techniques from authenticating communications and network technologies, and applying that to these GPS signals might be, I think, the best solution. That certainly has worked very well in terms of secure authentication in networks, secure software updates, et cetera, making sure that the message you're receiving is actually coming from who you think it's coming from. To me, that's approved and a well established solution in the network space probably applies quite well here.

B (26:57)

Also, you mentioned earlier that the military at some point had opened up access to gps. And I remember when that happened, suddenly devices got a lot more accurate. As you say, we're down to centimeter accuracy now. Does the military have their own separate fallback on this or are they still using the same system that all the rest of us use?

C (27:22)

The military is very much using the same system that all the rest of us use. There's been a lot of talk and some funding going towards the next gener generation of gps. And Maria, certainly I'm curious what you've heard about this. It's early days for those. There's a number of companies on those contracts. But as of right now, military is totally reliant on the legacy GPS architecture.

A (27:48)

Yeah, I was just thinking of that because just as you mentioned it, Dave, I was racking my brains. I'm like, I know I've been hearing a lot about this and it's still does sound very preliminary to Brandon's point. But I want to say I've also been hearing about putting PNT in low Earth orbit, which is an interesting idea. I guess the idea there'd be more redundancy but just because of where it would be versus in medium Earth orbit, I'm just kind of like how would that work? Someone's figuring it out. But it's like, why low Earth orbit? In that case, what would be the advantage there? Aside from proliferation I would assume.

C (28:20)

Yeah, I've heard that as a defense against some other elements, which is that's not necessarily defending against jamming and spoofing.

A (28:28)

More kinetic stuff.

C (28:29)

It's more kinetic stuff, right? It's more, it's more attacks against the space based architecture itself. In lower Earth orbit you need a lot more satellites. But those satellites can be a lot less exquisite because they're a lot closer. I mean a lot, a lot closer. I mean low Earth orbit We're talking like 300 miles. Medium Earth orbit is like 12,000 miles or something.

B (28:52)

Like.

C (28:52)

So the amount of power you need to transmit down to ground, much less. But then again you need a lot more satellites to provide that proper coverage. But you know, I've heard talks about putting it on, on some of these mega constellations, et cetera as well. Yeah, I mean some of the other techniques here are get going away from space based solutions altogether. There are terrestrial based solutions and one of them is legacy technology called Loran, which was originally invented during the Cold War using a much lower frequency communication but an over the horizon frequency range that would allow kind of. I mean it's really hard to jam that really hard to spoof that and but unfortunately that also requires much larger equipment, at least back in the day to properly receive those signals. So there are other ideas out there. Like there's some quantum stuff that I've been reading about in terms of navigation and laser based inertial navigation. I mean tons of different technologies that people are actively investing in right now to try to solve this problem.

A (30:02)

That was Brandon Karp, friend of the show, discussing maritime GPS jamming and spoofing.

C (30:21)

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