Is it possible to coerce a 213-foot yacht off its course — without touching the boat’s steering wheel — using a custom-made GPS device? That’s what Todd Humphreys wanted to find out. Humphreys, a researcher in the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics at the Cockrell School of Engineering, and his team successfully “spoofed” an $80 million private yacht using the world’s first openly acknowledged GPS spoofing device. Spoofing is a technique that creates false civil GPS signals to gain control of a vessel’s GPS receivers. The purpose of the experiment was to measure the difficulty of carrying out a spoofing attack at sea and to determine how easily sensors in the ship’s command room could identify the threat. The animation in the video explains how the research team
performed the GPS spoofing experiment on the yacht. The researchers hope their demonstration will shed light on the perils of navigation attacks, serving asevidence that spoofing is a serious threat to marine vessels and other forms of transportation. Last year, Humphreys and a group of students led thefirst public capture of a GPS-guided unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), or drone, using a GPS device created by Humphreys and his students.“With 90 percent of the world’s freight moving across the seas and a great deal of...
