A government report warned that the UK must reduce its reliance on GPS technology for its critical infrastructure and emergency services to mitigate the disastrous effects of GPS signal jammers. Cabinet Office Minister Oliver Dowden (Oliver Dowden) said in a letter to the long-awaited Science Bureau document that the Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) is often described as an “invisible tool.” He said: “As shown in this report, it is in our national interest to recognize the exact nature and extent of our dependence on global navigation satellite systems.
He wrote in the “Satellite” report: “In the case of GNSS outages, we must take measures to increase the resilience of critical services, including the use of potential backup systems when needed.” Time and location: critical dependency study (PDF) . Last year, the government warned the UK that if a major GPS malfunction occurs, the UK will lose 1 billion pounds a day. In 2016, the decommissioning of American satellites caused errors in the GPS network, which affected some industries in the UK.
According to the report, one of the biggest threats is increasing interference with signals from GNSS caused by “interference” and “spoofing.” “In the past 15 years, gps jammer systems have proliferated rapidly: from military territories to criminal groups to criminal groups, and now, ordinary people are looking for and holding disruptors to protect themselves from being followed in their daily lives. risk.”
There are two main GNSS applications for emergency services, which use data from the caller’s phone to locate emergency situations. And navigate quickly and successfully. This technology is also very common in financial services. Transactions are usually driven by algorithmic transactions, requiring time stamps in the range of milliseconds to microseconds. This form of accurate timekeeping also requires traceability for auditing.
Charles Curry, the founder of GPS resilient company Chronos Technology and the author of the report, told El Reg: “In my opinion, there is no difference between cyber attacks on the Internet and cyber attacks using GPS scrambling technology. North Korea and Russia Have been doing this all the time. What would prevent someone from starting a high-power jammer in central London and evading the financial services industry? He added that the government must act in a way that takes appropriate safeguards, because only relying on legal deterrence to avoid a blockade is not enough.
According to the “Wireless and Telegraph Communication Act” (2006), intentional transmission in the GNSS frequency band without authorization or without notice. Therefore, using bottling equipment is illegal, but owning the equipment is not. The report said: “This means that the court must prove its intent to use, which may be difficult.” Initially, GPS was a military system that provided degraded services for civilian users-with an accuracy of several tens of meters-but in 1983, Korea In an accidental theft of Airline Flight 007, Ronald Reagan signed an executive order authorizing civilians to use GPS.
The report calls for increased awareness of our dependence on global navigation satellite systems; the need to protect the GNSS spectrum; improve national risk assessment; and the need to provide backups, such as enhanced low-frequency navigation systems (LORAN). Government, industry and academia will also need to adopt a more cohesive approach.