Iranian engineer claims simple GPS hack took U.S. drone down

By Stephen C. Webster
Friday, December 16, 2011

An unnamed Iranian engineer reportedly working to reverse-engineer a U.S. drone recently captured by Revolutionary Guard forces told a reporter for The Christian Science Monitor that the aircraft was downed through a relatively unsophisticated cyber-attack that tricked its global positioning systems (GPS).

The technique, known as “GPS spoofing,” has been around for several years, and the Iranians began studying it in 2007, the engineer reportedly said. The U.S. Department of Energy notes that GPS is widely used, but insecure, although few users have taken note. GPS signals for the U.S. military are similarly insecure, and drones often rely on signals from multiple satellites.

“With spoofing, an adversary provides fake GPS signals. This convinces the GPS receiver that it is located in the wrong place and/or time,” the vulnerability assessment team at Argonne National Laboratory explained. “Remarkably, spoofing can be accomplished without having much knowledge about electronics, computers, or GPS itself.”

Worse yet for U.S. forces, it’s an exploit the Iranians reportedly learned after reverse engineering other U.S. drones they shot down, gaining a key bit of leverage against not just drones, but virtually any U.S. military hardware that depends on the same easily exploited signals. READ MORE