Airway UM688 Iraq: Fake GPS signals causing nav failure over Iraq
 

Flights Misled Over Position - Nav Failure Follows

- New RISK WARNING: Enroute aircraft are being targeted with fake GPS signals, leading to complete nav failures
- 12 separate reports – types include Embraer 190, Boeing 737, 747 and 777, G650, CL650, Falcon 8X and Global Express.
- This type of GPS spoofing has not been seen before – IRS is quickly “infected” by false position

- OPSGROUP Members: Suggested Guidance and Procedures, and original crew reports, in Briefing PDF below.


https://ops.group/blog/gps-spoof-attacks-irs/

Many moons ago someone in this Forum advised me that ops.group was not supposed to be taken so seriously :)

one verified similar incident
 

Just sent the link to a friend who now flies out if the sandpit
and received this within a few minutes.

"at one point the ANP went up 20.0 … aircraft started to turn not knowing at all where it was… luckily it was a very short outage, so i kept in TRK SEL…maintened the course till the outage/wrong signal vanished and then re engaged!!
But it was the first time its been such a huge nac error,
Normally that area is already riddled with jamming and gps messes up!!"

He said he flies that airway quite often.

Couldn't that also be said of this website? This thread may soon be removed?

Strange.
Spoofing the signal of a single GPS satellite would just result in the RAIM system discarding that satellite data.
And spoofing the signal of all satellites that are in line of sight would be extraordinarily complex, would be valid for a single airplane and would require knowing the exact location of that plane.
The only spoofing strategy that (I think) appears to be simpler is spoofing the EGNOS signal for en-route augmentation.
However, I guess that all GPS receivers can be set to enable/disable SBAS signals.

It's been happening for years, but the results are getting more interesting. In the 737NG it starts with a GPS INVALID L/R, if that state persists for a while you'll get the GPS and GLS fail lights as well. In five percent of the flights or so I've seen the UTC time reappear on the clocks, but several hours off - that's quite impressive - so the signals were good enough to get through the RAIM logic at least momentarily. That also causes lovely false EGPWS warnings, TOO LOW TERRAIN for instance when you're on short final on an ILS or so. Since I mainly fly in that area I'm unfortunately used to it by now, but not being able to fly RNP procedures, not having terrain display and reverting to conventional navigation with ANP above 5NM are really reducing the safety margins.

I’ve flown through there what seems dozens of times since the jamming and spoofing started. I hear some operators have been getting EGPWS terrain warnings, i.e. pull-ups, in the cruise and/or on approach to destination as the GPS altitude can stay messed up on some receivers even when the jamming has stopped.

The funniest one was last year when somewhere over northern Iraq all the reminders we’d put in the system went off at once. I thought the interference might have spoofed the time but it was the same as on the iPad. Hmm. Checked the date and it was several days in the future, very clever!

What’s ops.group? Some sort of conspiracy theorist hideout?

Is that poorly worded? The IRSes themselves wouldn't be affected would they, looking at the raw IRS output? Whatever the FMC is tricked to do with all navigation inputs is another question.

We would lose both GPS’s on nearly every departure out of TLV going north toward Turkey. Lots of Jamming in Syria. Some of the A330’s would not reacquire the GPS signal exiting that area resulting in NATS restrictions. I understand Airbus has since fixed that issue.

I think that the OPS group is for real, and serioius.

GPS jamming is one thing. Spoofing, especially a lasting / actionable one as some report here is an altogether different proposition.
I am really surprised it is actually happening to that extent. This need some serious “gear” and competency - what is the intent ? Sure not just annoy overflying aircraft ?

Could it be a certain country trying to avoid precision strikes on its nuclear arms infrastructure?

Retransmission?
 

From a purely technical perspective, wouldn't retransmission of GPS signals with a high powered transmitter be able to achieve something like this? Low-powered retransmission of GPS signals is sometimes used to improve GPS coverage indoors, but if done with a high power transmitter that drowns out the signal from the satellites to nearby receivers, wouldn't that make other receivers think they are at the location and altitude of the retransmitted signals..?

Short answer yes but you have to "recompute" your output so that the receiver "sees" something (ie multiple satellites with a coherent signals) that will pass validation. Not trivial. I mostly wonder about the cost / benefit of this applied to commercial airliners overflying Iraq.

For real, sort of. Serious, no.

Surely this is likely not to be aimed at the airliners. They are collateral damage. The russians have had a lot of aviation assets on the Syrian side of the border. Iran is not far away (and indeed was lobbing missiles at Erbil airport not so long ago) and the Turkey/Kurd situation means that there are any number of big players who might be behind this for primarily military purposes. However I certainly would not fancy flying between the mountains into Sulemanyah right now in the middle of the night in poor weather.

Nothing new. The Russians regularly used spoofing and since years , especially during navy maneuvers, I remember some ships found themselves 30 NM inland Norway a few years ago,
It is not rocket science to do but is likely a State capability, but seen the recent military exchanges between Russia and Iran , Less hair hypothesis above earlier looks plausible.

hi, question is, what is beeing done to address the GPS trouble. NOTAMs are out since a long time. Example: "A0639/23 NOTAMN Q) ORBB/ A) ORBB B) 2308050000 C) 2311042359 E) 1-ALL AIRLINES FLYING THROUGH BAGHDAD FIR-ORBB SHOULD EXPECT GPS JA MMING/GNSS INTERFERENCE IN THE NORTHERN PART OF IRAQ ALONG THE ATS RO UTE UM688 FROM RATVO TO VAXEN............ So, is the airspace avoided or or what´s beeing done ? Not enough, I think.

If there is extra cost involved…what do you think the airlines are going to do…?

It’s not like you can avoid the area easily - for many airlines Damascus, Kyiv, Amman, Jeddah, Baku, Tehran, Kabul, Sanaa, etc. FIRs are out-of-bounds, in part or in whole, which makes routing to/from the Middle and Far East problematic at the best of times. Even Baghdad FIR is deemed unsafe at lower levels.