AIS Spoofing - Serious Security Risk

[rgleason]

Thanks Dave. That's probably what happened. Like Atons. A prankster mucking around. I guess ais and gps will eventually become encrypted and more secure. New devices? VHF/GPS, AIS, and GPS, What a pain.

Dave wrote
"Plotters will see circles, or any other interesting graphic the hacker may want to render, "etch-a-sketch" style."

[fgd3]

The article--admittedly not very clear about what was going on--didn't attribute the circles to AIS signals received on board but to GPS positions reported over time, including those from cell phones running fitness apps that tracked the users' positions.


Fabbian

[sailormed]

As far as I know North Korea is also involved in AIS spoofing/trafficing. It is not only the illegal sand boats that need to move unnoticed. North Korean ships need to bust the blokkade imposed by UN sanctions.


And NK has a lot more IT engineers then the sand smugglers. They need a testing ground where a lot of ships are moving.

[transmitterdan]

I suppose the spoofing in Shanghai is designed to shift the position of GPS receivers and somehow that I cannot explain it shifts the positions by a specific distance but not necessarily the same angular displacement. So receivers’ positions jump away from their “true” position and form a circle of positions. A circle is just a set of points equidistant from a single point.

AIS transponders on commercial ships could be hardened through use of inertial measurement units (IMU) and backup high stability clocks. Then a spoofed GPS signal could be detected through comparisons with these other sources of time and position.

In fact, there is a good argument for having multiple radio time standards in addition to GPS. Then it would be much more difficult to spoof GPS because a GPS unit could have multiple high quality time estimates to compare. The abandonment of older and harder to jam radio time standards by the US and Europe was a mistake that should be corrected. The US seems poised to fix this mistake soon but the EU has its head in the sand.

But the AIS over the air signal itself is totally insecure by today’s standards and there doesn’t seem to be any reasonable way to change that. So someone with a $15 software defined radio and a laptop can send out fake AIS data with impunity.

It’s a reminder to keep those radars, binoculars and hand bearing compasses in good working order.

[rgleason]

To bad we don't still have LORAN. There were units that would compare Loran and GPS.


Didn't someone write that the military has access to multiple time clocks and ways of verifying the signal, and that a less secure non-military version could be implemented using a small part of the military signal?


I suppose that would still mean new GPS for everyone.

[zboss]

Everyone assumes that loran or other older technologies wouldn’t have equal or more susceptibilities to hacking. If GPS doesn’t work use radar, markers, and dead reckoning.

[CarlF]

The problem with this sort of scare mongering is that it's just about inconceivable that it could impact an ordinary cruiser in most cruising waters. These are short range, limited time, limited area spoofs/interference. Worse, they don't work particularly well since most people in an 8knot boat would realize they are off course well before something bad happened.

Should someone actually figure out a way to do this over a large area for more than a few minutes outside of a war zone 1) There would be security calls on VHF from the CG 2) Guys with many guns would be sent by the military to turn it off.

If someone wants to attack one of us, there are much easier ways than messing with your navigation gear - like tangling your props with some floating line tossed in front of you.

[Moo]

I suggest that the centre of the circle points to the source of the spoof transmissions. The same time required to reach any point on the circumference of the circle.

[Canne]

Okay, you are going to tell me was I a victim of spoofing in 2017 or not:
Crossing back from an undisclosed beautiful Mediterranean island to the continent one needs to pass close to also undisclosed big naval base which is often closed waters. That day it was not, I checked before the crossing. It was a beautiful sunrise, nobody around. I was nodding off in the cockpit after a night of sailing, when all of the sudden, out of nowhere "came this ship"! I hear my computer screaming at the chart table. I look around. Nothing. I used binoculars. Still nothing. I took this screenshot:

I had Internet and I confirmed from the MarineTraffic.com immediately that it, too saw the Flying Dutchman.

Later on I found out that the MMSI belonged to a whale watching safari company fast boat. Ever since I've been wondering was it the company falsifying their trajectory (why, so close to shore, they told me that they have not moved that day?) or the military? Or my equipment?

I had the AIS sentences recorded, I passed them through a specialized program, AIS decoder. Only thing I saw suspicious in the frames was this: