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Do you use a cash till? Have a smart meter? Employ a satnav for guidance? All rely on the positioning and timing functions of navigation satellites to do their job, as do many other technologies in daily use. And while we have become accustomed to 24/7 availability of their signals from 22,000 miles above us, their susceptibility to interference, intended or not, has far-reaching consequences â an issue explored in this issue â©
A perhaps lesser known vulnerability lies in the use of Global Navigation Satellite Systems such as GPS for what is termed social navigation, i.e., influencing people towards common objects or spaces based on the actions or findings of others. â©
Community-based networks such as Waze, use crowdsourcing to good effect in delivering what it describes as âa socially-informed GPS app for drivers.â But what makes Wazeâs âlive mapâ traffic reporting so attractive to its 50 million users also makes it a prime target for hackers. â©
The potential for spoofing (deliberately misleading) Waze users is highlighted in recent research conducted by four researchers at the Technion University in Haifa, Israel.1 â©
They revealed the ease with which Waze controls can be bypassed by peer-to-peer Sybil botnets to cause financial damage, compromise security, breach privacy and influence traffic flows and routing decisions, e.g., by creating non-existent traffic jams or diverting users away from phantom roadworks. While ways of mitigating attacks that balance simplicity, effectiveness and cost are proposed, the use of stronger registration and validation mechanisms would prove equally effective. However, this poses a dilemma for Waze which, like most social networks, needs a critical mass of users to be effective, As such, it requires a bare minimum of information for registration purposes.â©
With similar community-based apps from the likes of Moovit and Navmii, the cyber security aspect of satellite navigation is likely to join signal jamming as a key concern among the GNSS community. â©
1. Exploiting Social Navigation. Meital Ben Sinai, Nimrod Partush, Shir Yadid & Eran Yahav. Oct 2014. â©
(downloadable from www.slideshare.net/TopSecretSpyFiles/exploiting-social-navigation). See also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Bl0PU6EQI
