In 2023 someone hacked the GPS signal of 20 planes. The European alternative Galileo already offers an option to avoid it
A pilot Fly on the Baltic Sea When, suddenly, all his navigation systems told him that he was tens of kilometers of his real position, drawing ghost circles on Russian territory. Weeks before, in the Middle East, More than 20 crews They had reported a “total navigation failure”, forcing aerial drivers to guide them blind. They were not technical problems. They were deliberate attacks on GPS systems, known as spoofing or signal supplantation. In this type of attack, a powerful transmitter on land emits false signals that mimic the satellites, cheating the plane to calculate an erroneous position and route. Already in 2012, a team from the University of Texas showed that it was possible Take control of a civil drone through Spoofing. In 2017 there were the first cases with ships passing through the black sea. Today the Baltic and the Persian Gulf are black points where maritime operators and airlines routinely report similar incidents. Europe’s response is already here. Until now, the aviation sector has avoided a catastrophe thanks to redundant systems and the expertise of the pilots. But The threat is real, it is growing And you need a robust technological solution. Therefore, the Galileo constellation, the European GPS, has just officially activated its Osnma service: An additional security layer that hinders this type of deception without degrading the performance or precision of positioning. How Osnma works. The Open Service Navigation Message Authentication (OSNMA) is a kind of digital authenticity seal available for free For Galileo users. In essence, it is a cryptographic protocol that introduces authentication data into the signaling system itself. Specifically, in the I/NAV message of the E1-B signal; An already reserved space, hence it does not affect service performance. The process to have a compatible receiver is to obtain the cryptographic public key from the GNSS European Services Center. Upon receiving the signal, the receiver uses that key to verify the “digital signature” of the message. If the firm is false or does not exist, the receiver knows that he is being a victim of a hoax and can alert the pilot or the autonomous system. Prevents the Spoofingnot the Jamming. Osnma makes supplanting a Galileo signal exponentially more difficult. However, it does not prevent the Jammingthat is, someone interfere with the signal through a brute force attack That the receptors saturate. It is good news equally: it is no longer enough to issue a false signal; The cryptographic firm in real time, an immense computational feat should also be falsified. OSNMA will not only serve to Increase security in air and sea traffic management. It will also be key to the future of autonomous cars, smart tacographers and road use systems. Even for sectors such as telecommunications, energy and finance, which depend on an ultra -precise time signal to synchronize their operations. Image | ESA, Euspa In Xataka | The GPS has become the Achilles heel of modern aviation. And engineering already has its sustained ready
