Commercial Flights Are Experiencing ‘Unthinkable’ GPS Attacks and Nobody Knows What to Do::New “spoofing” attacks resulting in total navigation failure have been occurring above the Middle East for months, which is “highly significant” for airline safety.
GPS is old, the amount of data you get from the satellite is small, essentially satellite id and timestamp. If we would redesign this today, you could include a digital signature.
Sure, but… you can google this to verify … one can probably manipulate GPS by introducing delay, i.e. resend data from a sat that was hear some seconds ago. With this signal the location will be off.
But that would also mean the timestamp to be off. Just resending them would also require extremely precise timing if you want to simulate a position that is not anywhere but just a bit off the last position. Making a GPS position jumping around half the world is (comparably) easy, pushing it off for a few kilometers is much, much harder.