Covert Control of Surface Vessels via Counterfeit Civil GPS Signals

An attacker’s ability to covertly control a maritime surface vessel by broadcasting counterfeit civil Global Positioning System (GPS) signals is analyzed and demonstrated. The aim of this work is to explore civil maritime transportation’s vulnerability to deceptive GPS signals. It is shown that, despite access to a variety of high-quality navigation and surveillance sensors, modern maritime navigation depends crucially on satellite navigation. A simple innovations-based detection framework for GPS deception is developed, and given real-world environmental and attack parameters, the probability of hazardously misleading information (HMI) is minimized within the framework. A covert attack is designed to have a high probability of HMI and is possible because attacker-induced deviations in the vessel’s crosstrack dynamics can be disguised as the effects of slowly-changing ocean currents. A field experiment confirms the analysis by demonstrating covert control of a 65-m yacht in the Mediterranean Sea.