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Commercial aircraft flying in the Middle East and northern Europe have been caught up in a spate of GPS spoofing incidents, which have thrown onboard navigation systems off course and pose an increasing risk to air travel the world over, according to international aviation bodies and experts.
Commercial aircraft flying in the Middle East and northern Europe have been caught up in a spate of GPS spoofing incidents, which have thrown onboard navigation systems off course and pose an increasing risk to air travel the world over, according to international aviation bodies and experts.
In late August of last year, pilots operating in the Middle East began to report instances of their onboard navigation systems being overtaken by fake GPS signals, sometimes showing them to be hundreds of miles off course. This resulted in a “complete loss of navigational capability,” which in some instances forced crews to rely on verbal directions from air traffic controllers, according to OpsGroup, a membership organization for pilots and flight dispatchers. Aircraft of all sizes have been affected, including small business jets and large Boeing 777s.
The first reported incidents took place in a strip of Iraqi airspace close to the country’s border with Iran that is commonly used by flights traveling between Europe and the Gulf states. The pilot of a business jet traveling to Dubai reported that the plane almost flew into Iranian airspace, without authorization, due to the loss of its navigation system, according to OpsGroup.
“It’s not an idle problem. This could lead to real international incidents,” said Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.
The jamming of GPS signals is a relatively common phenomenon, particularly around war zones and sensitive military sites, where the practice is used to deflect potential drone or missile strikes. Pilots are alert to regional hot spots where such instances might occur and are able to fall back on other onboard navigation aids.
In spoofing incidents, however, false signals are broadcast that cause an aircraft’s electronic equipment to calculate incorrect positions and provide erroneous guidance—essentially tricking the aircraft’s GPS receiver into thinking it is somewhere it is not.
Experts say spoofing is potentially more dangerous than jamming, as pilots may not even initially be aware of what is going on, and false signals can “infect” the plane’s inertial reference system (IRS)—its navigational nerve center.
“Since August 2023, a new variety of GPS spoofing is being reported by crews, where the signal is sufficiently strong and of sufficient integrity to feed the aircraft systems,” according to a discussion paper from a February meeting of the Middle East office of the International Civil Aviation Organization, a United Nations agency. “The result is that within minutes, the IRS becomes unusable, and in many cases, all navigation capability on board is lost,” the document said.
Using data from a low-earth-orbit satellite network, Humphreys and his graduate student, Zach Clements, traced the signals responsible for the initial rash of spoofing reports close to a location in the Iranian capital, Tehran. They were unable to pinpoint who or what was responsible for the false signals.
Reports of spoofing skyrocketed across the region after the start of the war in Gaza in October 2023, in what experts say is a likely effort by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to thwart a missile attack by the Iran-backed militia group Hezbollah. On Oct. 15, the IDF acknowledged that GPS signals along Israel’s northern border with Lebanon, where Hezbollah is based, would be restricted but made no reference to spoofing.
“You know it’s gone mainstream not when the Russians are practicing it, or the Iranians, or the Chinese, but when allies of the United States are practicing it,” Humphreys said.
A spokesperson for the IDF did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Countries in northern Europe have also seen a flurry of disruptions to GPS signals since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, including a surge in spoofing reports beginning in late December of last year.
The website GPSJam.org, which uses publicly available flight data to pinpoint areas of likely GPS disruption around the world, showed an increase in disruption to GPS signals across the Baltic States and northern Europe starting around Dec. 25.
“These interference[s] have been quite constant since 2022, but the most intense disturbances have been observed since the end of 2023,” Latvia’s Electronic Communications Office, a government body, said in a statement to Foreign Policy. “Although several independent systems are used in the aviation industry for aircraft navigation, the disruption of the GNSS [Global Navigation Satellite System] system definitely worsens the level of aviation safety,” the agency said, using the catch-all term to describe satellite navigation systems, which includes GPS.
As in the Middle East, the disruption to GPS signals in Europe appears to be a spillover effect from nearby war zones. “Most cases are tied in with military base security in Russia. They are jamming the frequencies probably to avoid UAV attacks,” Col. Ants Kiviselg, the head of Estonian military intelligence, said in an interview with Foreign Policy last week. Russia has faced drone attacks from Ukraine since the war began, including on Moscow.
While the Russian Armed Forces is generally regarded as less technologically savvy than its Western counterparts, intelligence officials and experts note that Moscow punches above its weight when it comes to electronic warfare. Gen. Martin Herem, commander of the Estonian Defense Forces, suggested in an interview with Bloomberg that Russia may be testing its jamming capabilities in anticipation of a future war with NATO.
A spokesperson for the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) acknowledged that there had been an increase in reports of spoofing incidents around the Baltic Sea region starting in December but said that the agency had no evidence that a foreign government was responsible for the disruption. “We do not have any proof of state involvement and also have no indication that civil aviation is targeted,” they said.
GPS, which stands for global positioning system, is owned by the U.S. government and serves as the backbone for many of the world’s navigation systems, telecommunications, and financial transactions. Radio signals emitted by a network of GPS satellites can be used for precision navigation and timing, but they are also weak and easily overpowered—a problem that the U.S. government has long acknowledged.
A report released by the U.S. Department of Transportation in 2001, as GPS use was becoming more widespread in transportation infrastructure, cautioned that it could become a “tempting target that could be exploited by individuals, groups or countries hostile to the United States” and acknowledged the risk of both jamming and spoofing. One of U.S. President Joe Biden’s senior advisors on resilience and crisis response described GPS as a “single point of failure” in the nation’s infrastructure at a meeting of the president’s National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation, and Timing Advisory Board in December 2021.
“It’s this huge vulnerability and threat that is out there and not officially recognized, and little is being done,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation and Timing Foundation, a nonprofit that advocates for more secure GPS systems.
Spoofing technology, once the preserve of highly skilled engineers, is becoming more widely accessible.
Humphreys developed the world’s first openly acknowledged spoofer as a Ph.D. student at Cornell University in 2008, and he later used the device to throw an $80 million private yacht off course during a controlled experiment in the Mediterranean Sea.
“The device that I built in 2008 took a lot of sophistication—I was just finishing my Ph.D., I was an expert in GPS, I was an expert in software-defined radio—and it took me a year to build it,” he said. “By now, spoofing is such that somebody with a $1,000 budget and access to the web can buy the right box and download some software and get a spoofer up and running.”
As GPS jammers have become more widespread, so too has the potential for disruption to travel. Drivers on the New Jersey Turnpike using illegal GPS jammers to prevent their employers from tracking their whereabouts have been known to disrupt signals at the nearby Newark Liberty International Airport.
In 2022, GPS interference in the area of Dallas Fort Worth International Airport caused significant flight delays and one runway to close. Despite extensive efforts, the Federal Aviation Administration was unable to locate the source of the interference. A spokesperson for the agency said that they found no evidence that disruption was intentional and that they continue to look into the source of the interference.
In late January, the EASA partnered with the International Air Transport Association (IATA), an airline trade association, to host a joint workshop to discuss ways to combat jamming and spoofing of navigation signals.
“GNSS systems offer tremendous advantages to aviation in increasing the safety of operations in a busy shared airspace,” said EASA acting Executive Director Luc Tytgat in a statement issued after the closed-door meeting. “But we have seen a sharp rise in attacks on these systems, which poses a safety risk. EASA is tackling the risk specific to these new technologies. We immediately need to ensure that pilots and crews can identify the risks and know how to react and land safely.”
Stuart Fox, director of flight and technical operations at the IATA, said that raising awareness about potential hot spots of GPS interference is key in helping pilots navigate the situation. “At the moment, we notice there is a lot of interest in this. All of the airlines are talking about it; they’re educating their pilots. That’s good,” he said.
For now, experts say that the risks of GPS spoofing causing an aircraft to crash are relatively low. Awareness of the problem is widespread among pilots and airlines, enabling them to take remedial action such as shutting off their GPS entirely when moving into known hot spots and relying on other methods of navigation.
Aircraft systems are designed to be fail-safe, and there would have to be a confluence of events for a plane to crash as a result of spoofing or a loss of GPS signal, Goward said. But there are other risks that could also have geopolitical implications. “One of the most likely scenarios is that some airplane gets spoofed and accidentally flies into Iran and gets shot down because they’re in Iranian airspace,” he said.
For now, Humphreys said, aviation is experiencing the secondary effects of GPS jamming and spoofing around war zones primarily intended to deter drones and munitions. “All of what we’re seeing so far is kind of collateral damage. But if the aircraft themselves are the target in the future, because Russia or Iran wants to create chaos in the air transportation systems of Europe, they could do so in a way that could really hurt the economy,” he said. “That’s probably what concerns me the most about our dependence on GPS.”
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