In a SpaceNews.com opinion article written by Dana Goward, the author the discusses the risks to America if GPS is jammed or spoofed from space1. The article discusses the inherent vulnerability risks that America accepted when they released GPS to the world for adoption. Once this occurred the exact specifications for the GPS signals were public knowledge and with that the possibility of the signal being interfered with or imitated increases significantly. She also writes that jamming GPS requires line of sight and from the ground that limits the large scale impact, but from a spacecraft visibility to a larger set of targets is accessible. The impacts ‘would have immediate and devastating impacts on broad geographic regions like Europe or the US’1. The article continues to discuss different nations systems similar to the US GPS system and highlights that in an effort to the world’s global navigation systems interoperable, these systems posses the capability to imitate one another. With that capability the level of effort to spoof one another is not a lot.
This article is very interesting when applied to the cyber security community due to the fact that Threat Actors would have access to the information they need to perform an Attack and could see a jamming or spoofing attack as easy money. One of the biggest deterrents a threat actor would have is GPS is a highly used system both by the commercial and government industries. This means that there are a lot of eyes on this system and an attacker would have a lot of attention put on them once they initiated an attack. So while the first few major techniques of the SPARTA structure are readily available, it seems like the juice isn’t worth the squeeze to move into the Execution step.
1 – https://spacenews.com/america-risk-high-impact-gps-jamming-spoofing-from-space/