Commercial Aircraft Navigation Systems Compromised by Spoofing Attacks

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes the following story:

In September, OPSGROUP, an 8,000-strong international group of pilots, dispatchers, schedulers, controllers, and flight technicians, began highlighting incidents in which commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region received spoofed GPS navigation signals. These attacks also impacted the fallback navigation systems, resulting in total failure, writes Motherboard.

There have been more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, centered around Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The attacks use a specific vector that OPSGROUP describes as "unthinkable" and exposes a "fundamental flaw in avionics design." The spoofing affects the aircraft's Inertial Reference System (IRS), used to help planes navigate.

"The IRS should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed," wrote OPSGROUP. "The idea that we could lose all on-board nav capability, and have to ask [air traffic control] for our position and request a heading, makes little sense at first glance - especially for state of the art aircraft with the latest avionics. However, multiple reports confirm that this has happened."

One report says that an Embraer 650 business jet crew en route from Europe to Dubai lost both GPS navigation units aboard the airplane and GPS signals to both pilot/co-pilot iPads. The crew said the IRS didn't work anymore, and they only realized something was wrong when the autopilot started turning left and right. After the aircraft flight management system showed a GPS error message, the crew requested radar vectors from air traffic control showing they were 80 nautical miles off course and had nearly entered Iranian airspace with no clearance.

Read more of this story at SoylentNews.