Armed Polite Society
Main Forums => The Roundtable => Topic started by: Balog on March 08, 2011, 11:02:16 PM
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20202-gps-chaos-how-a-30-box-can-jam-your-life.html?page=1
I wasn't aware how many things depend on GPS. Somewhat concerning overall.
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Indeed.
And, GPS jammers are now easy to come by.
Here's on for sale: http://www.dealextreme.com/p/qh-1-high-power-gps-l1-signal-jammer-blocker-with-ac-car-charger-1565-1575-mhz-55872
Costs $27 shipped from china.
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1. Are military systems protected against this?
2. Does this work on GLONASS navigation?
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Typical -- Europe sees that the answer is enhanced LORAN, while the U.S. is busy deactivating all legacy LORAN stations. In fact, I think they finished phasing them out last year.
And to think -- I sold my sextant when I sold my last sailboat. I wonder if you can even buy a sextant any more. -- or the books of tables that go with them.
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I was also concerned with the idea that time stamp spoofers could manipulate stock market buy orders to a few seconds before a stock started to rise. Or sell orders if they fall.
I gotta go turn my hourglass over now.
And I still have a slide rule and know how to use it.
Terry, 230RN
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Something about putting all your eggs in one basket comes to mind. :facepalm:
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And to think -- I sold my sextant when I sold my last sailboat. I wonder if you can even buy a sextant any more. -- or the books of tables that go with them.
Under $100: http://sargentwelch.com/product.asp?pn=IG0041788&sid=mercent&mr:trackingCode=7FAD110E-8036-DF11-A0C8-002219318F67&mr:referralID=NA
Under $200: http://www.landfallnavigation.com/-nd026.html?cmp=froogle&kw=-nd026&utm_source=-nd026&utm_medium=shopping%2Bengine&utm_campaign=froogle
Under $300: http://www.westmarine.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/Product_11151_10001_11059_-1?cid=chanintel_google&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=11059
Way over $300: http://www.amazon.com/Navigation-MS-733-Sextant-Horizon/dp/B000IMWYOK
I've thought about picking up this set: http://www.landfallnavigation.com/kcnb.html
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Just how effective are GPS jammers? Do they effectively jam the signal in an area or does it just screw with the accuracy?
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Just how effective are GPS jammers? Do they effectively jam the signal in an area or does it just screw with the accuracy?
Jam signals totally. GPS chips can't hear anything from the sats.
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Yep. Several available on DealExtreme and similar Chinese gadget sites.
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Jam signals totally. GPS chips can't hear anything from the sats.
I guess I was thinking about how much coverage one would have.
Why hasn't the US seen this on the battlefield more?
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I guess I was thinking about how much coverage one would have.
Why hasn't the US seen this on the battlefield more?
It is a radio signal. Hellooooo HARM!
Also, they are not so useful for insurgents, relative to regular army opponents.
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I guess I was thinking about how much coverage one would have.
Why hasn't the US seen this on the battlefield more?
I remember that Saddam Hussein had some Russian-made GPS jammers he used during Desert Storm. The official line is that they were "ineffective" in disabling or mistargeting GPS-enabled smart bombs and missles. There was a brief flurry of stories about the vulnerablilty of future US smart weapons to GPS jamming technology, then - silence.
Here's a link to a 2003 story: http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,81917,00.html
There are times I wouldn't mind a device to jam cellphones, but I'm probably on enough lists already - I'm not interested in adding my name to a group of people who bought illicit items from shady ChiCom companies . . .
It is a radio signal. Hellooooo HARM!
Jammer: $30. HARM?
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Jammer: $30. HARM?
It's an anti-radiation missile .... that means it will seek out sources of radiation .... like a GPS jammer for instance.
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There are times I wouldn't mind a device to jam cellphones, but I'm probably on enough lists already - I'm not interested in adding my name to a group of people who bought illicit items from shady ChiCom companies .
http://www.dealextreme.com/p/36w-high-powered-cell-phone-blocker-jammer-3g-gms-cdma-dcs-phs-11510
Pay with a prepaid credit card. ;)
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It's an anti-radiation missile .... that means it will seek out sources of radiation .... like a GPS jammer for instance.
I think he was saying it isn't very cost effective. A HARM missile probably costs several thousand dollars $870,000, compared to $30 for a GPS jammer.
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It's an anti-radiation missile .... that means it will seek out sources of radiation .... like a GPS jammer for instance.
I think he knows what a HARM is. He was asking the cost of one. IIRC the cost of a similarly performing and technologically capable missile from my Raytheon days was ~$100-200k. But that's been a while so that's more of a SWAG than anything else.
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I think he knows what a HARM is. He was asking the cost of one. IIRC the cost of a similarly performing and technologically capable missile from my Raytheon days was ~$100-200k. But that's been a while so that's more of a SWAG than anything else.
I think he was saying it isn't very cost effective. A HARM missile probably costs several thousand dollars $870,000, compared to $30 for a GPS jammer.
OK. [tinfoil] ;)
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Any GPS jammer powerful enough to keep a JDAM or any other GPS-guided munition from turning you into itty bits is going to cost more than $30 and won;t be bought off ebay.
Think about it:
Lethal blast area of warhead = X meters
CEP of munition with GPS = Y meters (which these days is less than X)
CEP of munition w/o GPS from drop/shot to target location = Y+something meters
CEP of munition when its last update was only 100 meters above your head cause you bought the $30 chicom GPS jammer and then hacked it to increase its power by 10X is still = Y meters (or close enough so that you won't care, 'casue you'll still be dead even if the jammer "works" as advertised)
Any GPS jammer that is powerful enough to really work is gonna cost some bucks and is well worth a HARM to kill it and/or its operators.
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I'm almost certain that military GPS systems utilize some different bandwidth/frequency from civilian GPS, and are probably better in terms of accuracy.
JDAM still has inertial guidance that CANNOT be jammed, period, and that will ride down your throat with pinpoint accuracy.
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I've thought about picking up this set: http://www.landfallnavigation.com/kcnb.html
Good GRIEF!
I had one of those sextants. It's PLASTIC, fer Gawd's sake. I think I paid all of $15 or $20 for it. They're claiming that "kit" is worth $300 and that it's a bargain at $215? And the other guys are asking that for just the sextant?
Wanna buy a bridge?
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I was also concerned with the idea that time stamp spoofers could manipulate stock market buy orders to a few seconds before a stock started to rise. Or sell orders if they fall.
I gotta go turn my hourglass over now.
And I still have a slide rule and know how to use it.
Terry, 230RN
What about your abacus? ;)
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Good GRIEF!
I had one of those sextants. It's PLASTIC, fer Gawd's sake. I think I paid all of $15 or $20 for it. They're claiming that "kit" is worth $300 and that it's a bargain at $215? And the other guys are asking that for just the sextant?
Wanna buy a bridge?
I found those locally for ~$170, if I recall right. Still highway robbery, even with decent optics.
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you should be able to rest easy on the stock market, computers don't reset the clock at the second. at most it's once an hour. and i'll bet once a day if not start up. =| not that that means some fool hasn't, tweaked the system for "better" time keeping. :facepalm: i'd worry more about groups with a lot of cash(talking billions here) deciding to try to trash the exchanges. [tinfoil] remember the frozen OJ gag in trading places? opps. i mean don't worry, nothing bad can ever happen in the US. Katie said so.
and speaking of shady chi-com sites, anybody order a good balloon popping laser lately? :angel:
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I had one of those sextants. It's PLASTIC, fer Gawd's sake. I think I paid all of $15 or $20 for it. They're claiming that "kit" is worth $300 and that it's a bargain at $215? And the other guys are asking that for just the sextant?
Here you go; nothing to upset your plastic allergy: http://www.landfallnavigation.com/nc1609.html?cmp=froogle&kw=nc1609&utm_source=nc1609&utm_medium=shopping%2Bengine&utm_campaign=froogle =D
Plastics with the most useful properties of brass aren't hard to come by, and the weight savings is a good thing if you're going to be using it a lot.
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Saglant, bring up the OP's article at
http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20202-gps-chaos-how-a-30-box-can-jam-your-life.html?page=1
Go to page 3, and look at the last paragraph.
Terry, 230RN
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from 230rns link-
And eventually you'll be able to navigate without any external signals, thanks to devices called "inertial measurement units", which track your movements from a known start point. Today, these IMUs use gyroscopes to measure orientation, plus accelerometers to tell how fast it is accelerating. Using this information, plus time, the acceleration is converted into speed and distance to reveal relative location.
Not like that is new technology. subs have been using it for decades and it was accurate enough for SLBM targeting 30+ years ago, I can't imagine it has gotten worse in the intervening years.
My first boat we had a dual IMU system called DMINS, second boat we ran a dual ESGN (ElectroStatic Gyro Navigation) System again plenty accurate for targeting SLCMs.
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$30 GPS jammers have a very small area of usefulness. You're talking a building. Best case, maybe a block if you know what you're doing. It's extremely easy to pinpoint. Honestly, the answer is going to be sideband logic circuits to tell if the signal is real or legit. If the GPS signal strength is X, and suddenly you get 5 * X, well, obviously you're being jammed or spoofed. Doesn't stop the jamming, but you can run lockdown and notification routines. If the signal is the same strength as the legit signal, you're just going to interfere with the level of accuracy, which can also be compensated.
Basically, the fix will mark up the cost of the units by maybe $20 in hardware (if that), and a couple dozen man-hours of coding.
This is basically what GPS guided weapons have incorporated, plus they have access to better algorithms than are publicly available. The GPS system was set up to give an accuracy edge to the military, basically they can read the P(Y)-code transmitted on both L1 and L2 with significantly less intensive computation than those without the crypto key.
All satellite navigation systems are vulnerable to this. It's not that big of a deal aside from DoS, and it's pretty easy to track. It's only a big deal if you didn't make a system with robust countermeasures.
Here's basically what happens:
Security Geek: Hey boss, can we add $20 to the price tag to make the thing more secure?
Marketing: zOMG, where's my martini! We can't raise the price, our competition will stomp us. Besides, I'm making commission here, and fraud prevention isn't factored into that!
Boss: My annual bonus is based on how many units we sell!
Security Geek: <facepalm>
(Few weeks/months later)
Security Geek: Some teenagers figured out how to defraud our devices with about $2 worth of parts.
Boss: zOMG! The CEO threatened to fire me unless we can announce to the media and shareholders that we fixed the problem!
Security Geek: It'll now cost a $100 in parts to fix, and $600 to pay people to install it. PER DEVICE. Instead of $20 per device, like I told you!
Boss: Cool, go do that, and I'll suck up to the CEO saying it was your fault for not implementing the fix in the first place.
Repeat as necessary. =D
This is how systems become more robust.
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that's what i meant, 3 seconds doesn't require updating the time more then once a day. randomly at that. =)
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If the GPS signal strength is X, and suddenly you get 5 * X, well, obviously you're being jammed or spoofed. Doesn't stop the jamming, but you can run lockdown and notification routines.
Even simpler; reality checks on the devices depending on the GPS. If it claims your bicycle or aircraft carrier briefly fired up warp engines for a half-second round trip to Bolivia, drop that data and wait until something more realistic happens for 2-100 packets in a row. The time-dependent ones are even easier; clocks accurate to milliseconds per week are cheap and tiny, so use two. If they agree and the GPS is more than a second off, disregard it until it either comes back to a reasonable error margin or a user initiates a munal reset.
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Everything RevDisk wrote is near enough to God's Own Truth and to several incidents where I was
Security Analysis Geek y'all ought to read it twice.
I do analysis at the behest of PHBs, customers, more-senior engineers, & such. I also do parallel analysis for my own benefit to better understand the problem, risk mitigation, etc. About 1/3 of the time, my risk mitigation "unauthorized why are you wasting your damn time on that s*** 'cause we have teh One Party Line Groupthink True Answer" analysis becomes the preferred alternative or highlights a risk that mgt finally takes seriously. Yeah, only a ~33% average for my gut, but the risks it has addressed have amounted to enough $$$ saved/made that my gut is worth its weight in ruby-studded platinum slathered in truffle sauce and the time expended in the noise of any staffing budget.
"Yes, this shows that if your O&O for $uper-$ystem is as you have it currently, you'll get slaughtered by the T-55 driving, loincloth-wearing, illiterate, zebra-molesting locals. Might want to address that, Mr. RetiredgeneralwehiredbasedonUSMAcontactsnotintelligence."