Excedrin Headache #99

New Bern, NC

I just read a very discouraging article, Researchers find crippling flaws in global GPS.   We boaters depend heavily on GPS and our chart plotters.  I'm afraid that the honeymoon may soon be over and we could have as much trouble with GPS spoofing, and remote hacking as we do with our PCs.

I've been afraid that this might happen for several years.   You see, the GPS satellites and the GPS receivers on our boats, in our phones, and in our cars, are nothing more than computers exchanging digital information.  The closest analogy is the Internet.   The short and simple is that GPS computers are just as vulnerable to hackers as Internet connected computers.  

The good news is that, aside from cyber war, the financial incentives for hacking GPS receivers are not as obvious as incentives for hacking people's PCs.  That probably explains why so many years have passed already without serious GPS hacking.  

The bad news is that so far, there are not firewalls  no antivirus, no security industry developed to help us secure our GPS'.  It is also bad news that GPS hacking is still in its infancy, and that much more sophisticated ways of GPS hacking are yet to be invented.

From the beginning, the military encrypted portions of the GPS signal.  The encrypted part hid the least significant digits in the lat/lon data that allows US missiles and bombs to find targets with one meter accuracy.   The less accurate parts of GPS were deliberately left unencrypted so as to be friendly to civilian industry.  If they made the public portions of GPS secure from the start, early GPS units would have been much more expensive, and many of today's GPS applications might never have gotten off the ground.

So, what does it mean to us ordinary boaters, phone owners, car drivers?  Be prepared for repeated expensive replacements/upgrades to your GPS equipment in years to come.  Virtually all the civilian GPS gadgets we own today are not set up to install software updates.  It is only reasonable to expect that the entire GPS system, satellites and receivers alike, will be junked and replaced with a brand new positioning system designed from the ground up to be secure.  Even with infinite money, that can't happen overnight, so be prepared for unexpected and prolonged blackouts of GPS functions.

Personally, I'm going to start thinking about a seminar for next year's SSCA Gam, entitled  "What to do if all your GPS units suddenly die."   

I am also going to dust off my sextant and my books on celestial navigation.  I've been carrying them around on the boat for several years, but I never studied or practiced enough to become proficient at it.