The discussion this past week about satellite comms that went down and caused Australian farmers to be unable to run their machines touched on a topic I’m very interested in. Failures of critical infrastructure can cause cascading disruptions to society that can be absolutely massive, and in the modern technological age, what used to require moving worlds to shut down something like that now only needs a simple unpatched vulnerability to have massive impact. Our reliance on these centralized, digital systems creates efficiency and speed but also creates a narrow choke point. Imagine if all planes lost the ability to navigate except by site, or if the Texas power grid shut down amidst a heat wave with no promise of return, if the water system of a place like Washington DC were knocked out for 48 hours.
No water means no baths, no cooking, no toilets to flush. The stores would be emptied within hours. Schools would close and parents would stay home with kids, or take the whole family out of the city. Our defense department, intelligence apparatus, regulators and bureaucrats – all sorts of disruptions would occur that could lead to cyclic panic and degradation.
These two articles from Space News this week are relevant to this discussion – both of which focus on our reliance on GPS for so many critical systems. The first is about a firm trying to create a jamming-proof GPS system and the latter is more broadly about the US government seeking to create alternatives more generally.
I think one of the very interesting things about GPS in this context is that the downlink traffic is openly broadcast in an unencrypted fashion, which opens up a second threat model. The first is threat is of jamming, because if signals can be jammed, all sorts of navigational systems like missiles, airplanes, tractors, and many more can cause disruptions to operations and every day life.
That second threat model might be more scary though. Since those systems depend on interpreting an unencrypted connectionless transmission, it can be tough to verify the legitimacy of the signal, which opens opportunity for spoofing. I think this requires a much more sophisticated operation to execute, and a targeted objective to pursue, but if one could make aircraft get lost, change missile trajectories, wreck cars, destroy crops, and who knows what else they could cause some real damage and chaos.