$30 GPS Jammer Can Wreak Havok 386
An anonymous reader writes "A simple $30 GPS jammer made in China can ruin your day. It doesn't just affect your car's navigation — ATM machines, cell phone towers, plane, boat, train navigation systems all depend upon GPS signals that are easily blocked. These devices fail badly — with no redundancy. These jammers can be used to defeat vehicle tracking products — but end up causing a moving cloud of chaos. The next wave of anti-GPS devices include GPS spoofers to trick or confuse nearby devices."
messing with air-traffic controllers get some hard (Score:5, Informative)
messing with air-traffic controllers can get you some hard time. I think it's federal pound you in the ass time.
Re:Vulnerable (Score:1, Informative)
Military has its own encrypted channels for GPS signals. Same satellites but not the same signal as consumer devices.
However, all GPS guided ordnance will fall back to various other methods if the GPS fails (laser, optical, etc). For example, Tomahawk missiles also have an optical map following system. Most (if not all) GPS guided bombs will fall back to laser guidance if the GPS fails.
Re:Multiple possible comments (Score:4, Informative)
(Technical): ...which is why they are illegal in nearly every regulatory environment.
Like drugs and guns, which we now have none of.
Oh, bad form... (Score:5, Informative)
Your basic RTC, say, isn't as accurate as GPS time; especially in the long term, or if not temperature compensated and subject to variable conditions; but it should still deviate by less than a second over a day or two of lost GPS(never mind 10-60 minutes of jamming) and can, if needed, retain reasonably accurate time for as long as power holds out, and they don't need much power.
Similarly, today's MEMS accelerometers and on-chip magnetometers/compasses, while you might not want to dead-reckon your way around the world with them, can easily enough compensate for losses in GPS fix over the short term, and can 'sanity-check' abrupt changes in GPS readings.
For static objects(like radar towers) you can basically treat position as a constant(possibly with recalibration from time to time if there are structural shifts) and calculate dish position based on a simple rotary encoder or the like.
Obviously, for space, power, and cost reasons, Joe Consumer's $50 cellphone or $80 dash-nav isn't necessarily going to incorporate multiple layers of GPS failsafe. If the GPS stops working, Joe can just use the meat-coprocessor he stores in his skull to suck it up and figure it out until GPS comes back online.
For more important systems, though, I would honestly have hoped for better, especially in situations(like cell towers and most ATMs) where the equipment itself isn't exactly inexpensive, so $50 or $100 worth of accelerometer and RTC failsafe would be reasonable, and where they usually have a network hard-line. NTP isn't perfect; but it certainly is handy(if necessary, users of dedicated circuits, rather than those who rely on public internet, might be able to achieve even greater accuracy by comparing their GPS time with the GPS time reported by the hardware on the other end of the circuit, to determine the round-trip time fairly exactly...)
Also, the "backup" gyrocompass mentioned in TFA, that failed to act as a backup to GPS because it crashed when it lost GPS signal is just sad. Perhaps it was purchased from the same company who provides emergency generators that can only be started by mains-powered control systems?
$30 box from evil empire (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ATM's??? (Score:4, Informative)
ATMs (and many other things) use GPS as a highly accurate master clock.
Re:WANT! (Score:5, Informative)
Deal Extreme has a few.
High Power GPS Blocker with AC Adapter and Car Charger $26
Mini GPS Blocker (with AC and Car Charger) - $105 [dealextreme.com]
Super Mini Cigarette Lighter GPS Blocker - $80 [dealextreme.com]
Or check out their full line of GPS and Cellphone blocking products. [dealextreme.com]
Re:WANT! (Score:3, Informative)
You could also build your own. The Wave Bubble [ladyada.net] is a *bit* fancier than those devices, but since it closes the loop on jamming frequency, you're almost guaranteed it'll be dead on.
Re:Vulnerable (Score:5, Informative)
Military has its own encrypted channels for GPS signals. Same satellites but not the same signal as consumer devices.
While this is true, it just means that you need to jam a different frequency. Encryption has nothing to do with it as you aren't trying to access it, but DoS it. The reasons that the military runs its own separate GPS are for better accuracy (civilian GPS has inaccuracy built in while military GPS is accurate to within a meter) and so they can shut it down without hurting themselves within a theater.
Re:Weak spot in FAA's "NextGen" system (Score:5, Informative)
I was recently flying a fairly expensive INS, and broke GPS lock in the middle of a flight. 3 hours of jet flight later, that INS showed me on the runway with the same 6-DOF (position, yaw, pitch, roll) within a couple of meters of what a still locked system was doing.
Re:Weak spot in FAA's "NextGen" system (Score:5, Informative)
Planes also have an IRU (internal reference unit) or laser gyroscope that is able to dead reckon where the plane is based on the fact of knowing where an aircraft was at some previous point, and summing up all of the movements of the aircraft since that point. Before GPS, using IRUs were the primary automated navigation tool for commercial aircraft. So even in the event of a loss of GPS fix, the aircraft still knows exactly where it is for a long period of time. I don't know if the IRU can feed its location fix back into the NextGen aircraft transponder (which normally uses GPS) that reports to air traffic control computers where the aircraft is.
Re:WANT! (Score:4, Informative)