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Commercial air crews are reporting something “unthinkable” in the skies above the Middle East: novel “spoofing” attacks have caused navigation systems to fail in dozens of incidents since September. 

In late September, multiple commercial flights near Iran went astray after navigation systems went blind. The planes first received spoofed GPS signals, meaning signals designed to fool planes’ systems into thinking they are flying miles away from their real location. One of the aircraft almost flew into Iranian airspace without permission. Since then, air crews discussing the problem online have said it’s only gotten worse, and experts are racing to establish who is behind it.

OPSGROUP, an international group of pilots and flight technicians, sounded the alarm about the incidents in September and began to collect data to share with its members and the public. According to OPSGROUP, multiple commercial aircraft in the Middle Eastern region have lost the ability to navigate after receiving spoofed navigation signals for months. And it’s not just GPS—fallback navigation systems are also corrupted, resulting in total failure.

According to OPSGROUP, the activity is centered in three regions: Baghdad, Cairo, and Tel Aviv. The group has tracked more than 50 incidents in the last five weeks, the group said in a November update, and identified three new and distinct kinds of navigation spoofing incidents, with two arising since the initial reports in September. 

While GPS spoofing is not new, the specific vector of these new attacks was previously “unthinkable,” according to OPSGROUP, which described them as exposing a “fundamental flaw in avionics design.” The spoofing corrupts the Inertial Reference System, a piece of equipment often described as the “brain” of an aircraft that uses gyroscopes, accelerometers, and other tech to help planes navigate. One expert Motherboard spoke to said this was “highly significant.” 

“This immediately sounds unthinkable,” OPSGROUP said in its public post about the incidents. “The IRS (Inertial Reference System) should be a standalone system, unable to be spoofed. 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.”

Signal jamming in the Middle East is common, but this kind of powerful spoofing is new. According to Todd Humphreys, a UT Austin professor who researches satellite communications, extremely powerful signal jammers have been present in the skies near Syria since 2018. “Syria was called ‘the most aggressive electronic warfare environment on the planet’ by the head of [U.S. Special Operations Command],” Humphreys told Motherboard. 

Humphreys directs the Radionavigation Laboratory at UT, which developed software that’s used by a powerful receiver on the International Space Station that’s used to study global navigation satellite signals from low-earth orbit. Today, Humphreys and the team of graduate students in his lab are constantly studying the signals in the region.

“Apart from run-of-the-mill jamming (e.g., with chirp jammers), we have captured GPS spoofing signals in our radio trawling,” he said. “But, interestingly, the spoofing signals never seemed to be complete. They were either missing key internal data, or were not mutually consistent, and so would not have fooled a GPS receiver. They seemed to be aimed at denial of service rather than actual deception. My students and I came to realize that spoofing is the new jamming. In other words, it is being used for denial of service because it’s more effective for that purpose than blunt jamming.”

There is currently no solution to this problem, with its potentially disastrous effects and unclear cause. According to OPSGROUP’s November update, “The industry has been slow to come to terms with the issue, leaving flight crews alone to find ways of detecting and mitigating GPS spoofing.”

If air crews do realize that something is amiss, Humphreys said, their only recourse is to depend on air traffic control.  

“The GPS and IRS, and their redundant backups, are the principal components of modern aircraft navigation systems,” Humphreys said. “When their readings are corrupted, the Flight Management System assumes an incorrect aircraft position, Synthetic Vision systems show the wrong context, etc. Eventually, if the pilots figure out that something is amiss, they can revert to [VHF omnidirectional range]/ [distance measure equipment] over land. But in several recent cases, air traffic control had to step in and directly provide pilots ‘vectors’ (over an insecure communications channel) to guide them to their destination. That’s not a scalable solution.”

Humphreys called the new spoofing attacks “highly significant.” 

“If the pilot figures out what’s going on and ignores the GPS and the corrupted IRS, then the spoofing’s effect is limited to denial of service,” Humphreys said. “But an important distinction with GPS jamming is that whereas jamming denies GPS, it doesn’t corrupt the IRS. Spoofing does, which is highly significant as regards airline safety.”

“It shows that the inertial reference systems that act as dead-reckoning backups in case of GPS failure are no backup at all in the face of GPS spoofing because the spoofed GPS receiver corrupts the IRS, which then dead reckons off the corrupted position,” he told Motherboard. “What is more, redundant GPS receivers and IRSs (large planes have 2+ GPS receivers and 3+ IRS) offer no additional protection: they all get corrupted.”

Humphreys and others have been sounding the alarm about an attack like this occurring for the past 15 years. In 2012, he testified by Congress about the need to protect GNSS from spoofing. “GPS spoofing acts like a zero-day exploit against aviation systems,” he told Motherboard. “They’re completely unprepared for it and powerless against it.”

According to Humprheys, the reports from OPSGROUP beginning in September were “the first clear case I know of in which commercial aircraft were flying off course due to GPS spoofing.”

The entities behind the novel spoofing attacks are unknown, but Humphreys said that he and a student have narrowed down possible sources. “Using raw GPS measurements from several spacecraft in low-Earth orbit, my student Zach Clements last week located the source of this spoofing to the eastern periphery of Tehran,” he said.

Iran would not be the only country spoofing GPS signals in the region. As first reported by Politico, Clements was the first to identify spoofing most likely coming from Israel after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attacks. “The strong and persistent spoofing we’re seeing over Israel since around October 15 is almost certainly being carried out by Israel itself,” Humprheys said. “The IDF effectively admitted as much to a reporter with Haartz.” Humphreys said at the time that crews experiencing this GPS spoofing could rely on other onboard instruments to land. 

Humphreys said the effects of the Israeli spoofing are identical to those observed in late September near Iran. “And these are the first clear-cut cases of GPS spoofing of commercial aircraft ever, to my knowledge,” he said. “That they happened so close in time is surprising, but possibly merely coincidental.”

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