How Common is GPS Jamming? (And How to Protect Yourself)

In 2013, the Federal Communications Commission fined a person almost $32k for using a device intended to evade the fleet management tracking system on his company vehicle. The device in question: a GPS jammer.

The incident occurred at the Newark Airport after FAA and NJ Port Authority officials struggled for over two years to determine why the new ground-based augmentation system (GBAS) – a system used primarily for augmenting aircraft take-off and landing systems – was experiencing intermittent failures. The cause of these failures seemed impossible to identify.

Eventually, with help from the FCC and with specialized equipment, they were finally able to identify the cause of these inexplicable problems: A contractor on site was using a GPS jammer that not only blocked his company vehicle’s fleet tracking system, it also took down the GBAS in the process.

GPS jammers are usually small devices that plug into a vehicle’s lighter port and emit radio signals that overpower or drown out much weaker signals such as GPS or others. Although GPS jammers are illegal in the US, they are easily available online and are becoming more and more common as the use of fleet management tracking systems increases. These devices may seem relatively harmless at first glance, but their potential to cause harm is significant.

The case of the jammer at the Newark Airport is a perfect example. A simple $30 device was able to take down a state-of-the-art, highly sophisticated landing system at one of the busiest airports in the world. Worse, the device user wasn’t even trying to do so. Imagine what a person who DID intend to do harm could do?

Remember, GPS is used for much more than just navigation. It’s also the primary source of timing and synchronization in critical infrastructures such as financial, communications, industrial, the power grid, and more. In fact, these infrastructures are so critically reliant upon GPS for timing and synchronization that over the past several years, the Department of Homeland Security has begun an initiative to raise awareness of the threat and find solutions to safeguard these vital systems.

In timing applications, jammers can disrupt the GPS signal, causing the underlying systems to lose their ability to synchronize their internal clocks and, in turn, their ability to stay in sync with the rest of the network. Since many critical infrastructures sectors require synchronization across their network to be within millionths of a second, even short-term GPS outages can have a major impact. Worse, when an outage occurs, there’s typically nothing to indicate that it’s a result of jamming. The GPS signal simply is not received anymore.

To make matters even more dire, many of the datacenters that house the servers these networks run on are in warehousing districts (with trucks coming and going frequently) or near major highways. These are two of the most likely places to encounter GPS jammers. In fact, at Orolia they know from experience and real-life examples that it not only happens … it’s relatively common.

It was with these threats in mind that Orolia has developed solutions to protect its customers. Late last year, they announced the release of BroadShield, which uses sophisticated algorithms to interrogate the RF signal being consumed by GPS receivers to detect anomalies such jamming or spoofing. And recently, they released a new anti-jamming (AJ) antenna.

The new AJ antenna attenuates, or blocks, RF signals that come from near the horizon. True signals come from the satellites near the zenith. False interfering ones typically come from the horizon.

A good way to visualize how it works is to stand with your arms straight out to either side, parallel with the floor, and then raise them up to create a 30-degree angle from the floor. If you were a GPS antenna on the roof of a datacenter, any RF signal coming from below your arms would be blocked. Since the most common source of jamming comes from people trying to evade fleet management tracking systems – in cars or trucks, or on the ground – the AJ antenna is a very effective method of protecting critical networks.

The AJ antenna is also a drop-in replacement for traditional GPS antennas, making it easy to deploy. It requires no special power, mounting, or placement considerations beyond what a standard antenna needs. We’ve had a chance to test this with some customers who were experiencing GPS outages due to jamming and have recorded some remarkable results.

Securing Critical Infrastructures from Jamming and Spoofing Cyberattacks

Every day, all of us use this little technological miracle called GPS to take advantage of precise and trustable position, navigation and timing (PNT), all over the world.

More than 2,000 billion Euros of critical infrastructures around the world are directly dependent upon GPS every day – including public and private, aerospace and defense, smart cities, IoT, finance, industry, automotive, ITS, mobility, broadcast and telecom, and Cloud. All benefit from this accurate and trustable PNT service to support their operations.

Without accurate time on a digital terrestrial network, you would get a frozen image on your TV screen.

Without an accurate position on your car’s GPS, you would still be using paper maps.

Did you know?
5 days without GPS/GNSS means 5B£ of economic loss… just for the UK.

Did you know?
The expansion and dependence of GPS into our daily lives and in every public or private industry also comes with technology risks, called jamming (signal interfered with a jammer, meaning no GPS signal) and spoofing (GPS signal hacked intentionally, meaning signal deception).

Did you know?
Jammers and spoofers are strictly forbidden by law and subject to heavy fees (>$200.000 in the United States of America). But they are relatively easy and cost effective to buy and/or build.

For example, a truck driver might use one who to remain off-grid from his fleet manager. Or a teenager might be caught spoofing GPS to play Pokemon Go. It happens all the time.

A more serious GPS spoofing event happened recently in the Black Sea. It’s consequence was significant. Military navy ships went blind and were unable to locate each other.

To make it worse, using a GPS jammer could not only affect a single location … but could affect up to multiple miles of radius!

This risk is real and can impact all industries, globally.

If PNT infrastructures are using multiple GNSS constellations, are they resilient to such cyberattacks?

Actually, no. All GNSS constellations (GPS, Galileo, Beidou, Glonass, IRNSS, QZSS) are weak RF signals, easy to interfere with and easy to jam. Having multiple constellations allows you to get better sky visibility with more satellites, avoiding signal reception loss. However, it is ineffective to counter cyberattacks such as jamming and spoofing. In fact, your PNT infrastructure may experience jamming and spoofing and you might not even know it … until your critical infrastructure goes down. Without specific GPS jamming/spoofing monitoring, your system is blind and may distribute non-reliable PNT data.

What if a PNT infrastructure is combined with other sensors like IMUs (position and navigation) but still has holdover capabilities (for time)?

IMU (position and navigation) and Holdover (time) will maintain PNT distribution in case of signal reception loss. However, PNT data will drift over time and cannot be maintained at the required accuracy level without being synched with an accurate and authenticated PNT source like GPS or GNSS.

In the case of spoofing, IMU should be able to provide a position and navigation backup only, and only on the condition that the PNT infrastructure is able to detect spoofing. Otherwise, the immediate consequence will be that only corrupted PNT data will be distributed over your network…

What are PTA steps (Protect, Toughen, Augment) to secure a PNT infrastructure?

What Is BroadShield?

BroadShield is the #1 GPS cybersecurity solution in the market, benchmarked over the last ten years by the US DoD. As software, it is available for SecureSync time servers or can even be integrated into third-party equipment.

What Is STL?

STL is a satellite time and location service from the Iridium® constellation. It offers two major benefits for timing Infrastructures:

  • RF Signal is 1,000 time stronger than GPS or GNSS, making it very hard to jam
  • RF Signal is also encrypted, making it very hard to spoof

Learn more about BroadShield and STL.

  1. Assess the Resiliency of your PNT infrastructure to cyberattacks
    Action item: Do a health check of your GPS Time and Location infrastructure.
  2. Apply resilient PNT solutions and systems that fit within your infrastructure’s requirements
    Action item: Secure GPS Source from jamming attempts with an anti-jam antenna. Filtering the GPS RF signal by eliminating jamming attempts with an anti-jam antenna will allow you to receive and maintain a trustable GPS reception source. This is a simple & cost-effective solution to apply.
    Action item: Secure your GPS PNT service from jamming and spoofing with BroadShield and STL. Detecting GPS jamming and spoofing is key to automatically trigger and smoothly achieve a resilient PNT service.
  3. Perform multiple PNT health checks per year to assess the resiliency of your PNT infrastructure and anticipate innovative cyberattack patterns.
    Like viruses in the IT industry, PNT cyberattacks are evolving and proliferating. To combat them requires a focused, innovative and resilient PNT company as a partner. With a global presence, Orolia will support your operations to ensure your infrastructure and operations are resilient.

For more information about Orolia’s resilient PNT systems and solutions, contact us.