A team of university students have demonstrated that it is possible to subvert global positioning system navigation signals to pilot a superyacht without tripping alarms.Of course, you should always have charts and a compass (and know how to use them) when you're on a boat. But 3° isn't much, and might be hard to detect by eye until you were pretty far off course. Just for perspective, the original Longitude Prize called for accuracy not to within 3°, but to within 3 minutes of longitude. 3° is a lot.
The experiment was conducted in June this year, with the permission of the owners of a 65-metre (213ft) superyacht worth US$80 million (A$87 million), the White Rose that sailed from Monaco to the island of Rhodes in the Mediterranean.
A team of mechanics students from the Cockrell School of Engineering at the University of Texas in Austin were on board the White Rose, with the experiment taking place some 50 kilometres off the coast of Italy in international waters.
Faint GPS signals were broadcast by the students from a spoofing device the size of a briefcase, aimed at the positioning system aerials of the ship. The authentic GPS signals were slowly overpowered by those transmitted from the spoofing device, after which the students had gained control over the yacht's navigational system.
Once in control, the students were able to shift the ship onto a new course, three degrees off the original one. As the navigational system reported location discrepancies and the crew initiated corrections, the White Rose deviated further from its original course.
Wednesday, July 31, 2013
Students hack luxury yacht's GPS
Did it remotely, by spoofing the GPS radio signals:
The good news for those of us on the commercial side of this is that we've got multiple redundancies to account for things of this nature-
ReplyDelete1). Multiple GPS units- even if you spoof one, we've got more. Sometimes GPS units go offline and into Dead Reckoning mode- advancing where they *think* you are based on your course and speed when the signal dumped. Because the Queen Elizabeth II bumped her bloomers on Nantucket for that reason, there are multiple non-gps redundancies, and failure to use all available means of navigation, including use of gyroscopic and magnetic compasses, Automatic Radar Plotting Aids, chart plotting, running fix, electronic chart plotting, dead reckoning, doppler log and good old Celestial Navigation, a fix on the sun or stars, which must be done at least once every watch.
Those of us who are nth-generation sailors can also navigate shallow waters by water depth and bottom type- throw an armed sounding lead over the side, read the depth and see what kind of sediment comes up in the tallow plug in the lead. Navigation charts track bottom type for just this reason.
Failure to use *ALL* available navigation means has been and continues to be a crime on par with sodomy, having a cat on board or stealing the bosun's stores before the bosun steals them.
In all seriousness, a watch officer who wrecks a ship and survives is often better off loading his pockets with nuts and bolts and jumping in the water. Doesn't matter if it's his fault or not. Someone is going to jail forever.
Being 3 degrees off course means a trip of 500 miles will miss the destination by about 26 miles. Not what you want to hear if you're on a tight schedule, or if you're flying a bomber.
ReplyDeleteI know these guys, have seen their ops, and it DOES work. Not going to say what other requirements, but it IS pretty scary with the 'dependence' on GPS to do everything. However Paul is correct, if you're totally relying on GPS without using the other systems available, you probably get what you deserve!
ReplyDeleteAmen, old NFO. My old captain would turn off certain distracting instruments at different times to get the new mates interested in looking out the windows and using manual means of navigation, but he did that with the goal in mind to teach the kids how to use every instrument available. To date, every watch on an American merchant ship has to perform a celestial fix, and gyro error must be logged via an azimuth or amplitude reading once a day.
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