Were US Navy ships spoofed?

So far this year four U.S. Navy ships have been involved in collisions. The latest occurred on Monday off the coast of Singapore. And while the cause is still under investigation, this man wonders if there was more than just human error involved.

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“We convincingly faked the GPS signals and made a receiver think it’s in some other place,” Dr. Todd Humphreys said in an interview with PBS.

Humphreys is a University of Texas researcher who, in 2013, demonstrated how satellite guidance systems could be spoofed.

“Could you, for example, remotely and clandestinely lead an expensive and enormous ship at sea, off course, without the crew even knowing? And it turns out the answer is yes,” Humphreys said.

He set up a specially-designed transmitter on a private yacht and was able to trick the GPS display so that it showed the yacht drifting three degrees.

When the captain saw the yacht drifting, he immediately corrected his heading until the GPS showed the ship back on course. But he was, in fact, steering the ship off course.

Now that was a controlled experiment, but just last June the real thing happened to 20 civilian ships in the Black Sea. Dr. Humphreys said that what appeared to be a signal from the Russian mainland tricked the GPS displays into showing the ships as being on land near an airport!

But again, while it’s possible, there’s no indication that the Navy ships, which use encrypted GPS, were hacked. Which is good, because it wouldn’t do for the world’s most powerful Navy to be at the mercy of some guy with a little black box.

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