A new algorithm developed by researchers at the University of Texas at San Antonio in the US, it detects effects of tricks in GPS attacks on electrical grids and other GPS-reliant technologies. The purpose is to help detect and prevent cyber-attacks on GPS-enabled devices in real time.
“Malicious agents have the ability to disrupt a device’s understanding of time and location by emitting a signal that is pretending to be a GPS signal,” said Nikolaos Gatsis from UTSA.
“This can be very harmful in several different realms of technology,” said Mr. Gatsis, the researcher on the study published in the journal IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics.
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The US electrical power grid, for example, depends on GPS to give timestamps for its measurements at stations across the country.
Researchers in laboratories across the world have shown that the system can be dangerous and vulnerable to spoofing cyber attacks that can obstruct the system’s time and location data, results totally failure of further execution.
“In broad terms, malicious cyber-attackers can clone the GPS signal and display, for instance, the wrong time or the wrong location,” said David Akopian from UTSA.
“This can wreak all sorts of havoc. It can send people to the wrong location or render hours of data useless,” Mr. Akopian said.
The algorithm, which can be applied to cell phones or computers as easily as a new app, has the ability to recognize false GPS signals and counter an attack while it occurs.
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