UT Austin GPS spoofing experiment against the superyacht White Rose of Drachs (2013)
What happened
In June 2013 a University of Texas at Austin team led by Todd Humphreys took navigational control of the 213-foot, $80 million superyacht White Rose of Drachs in the Mediterranean, roughly 30 miles off the Italian coast, using counterfeit civil GPS signals broadcast from a briefcase-sized device carried aboard. Graduate students Jahshan Bhatti and Ken Pesyna operated the transmitter. A faint ensemble of counterfeit civil GPS signals was raised in power until it overpowered the authentic signals, a transition the ship's two GPS receivers did not flag; the reported position was then moved to attacker-chosen values. The navigation system read the false position as a drift off course, the crew corrected for the drift, and the correction was the actual course change. The yacht left its intended track by hundreds of metres while the electronic chart display continued to show a straight line. The experiment was authorised by the vessel owner and is a controlled demonstration, not an attack.
An authorised research experiment, not an attack: conducted with the vessel owner's permission by a named university team and published by the university. It is in the corpus because SPARTA's bibliography cites it at seven techniques and because it is the controlled demonstration the maritime spoofing record's mechanism claim rests on; the peer-reviewed write-up (Bhatti and Humphreys, NAVIGATION 64(1)) is a source in both records. Two of the three technique edges are held at moderate because SPARTA's PNT and sensor-spoofing techniques are written with the spacecraft as the deceived party and the victim here is a shipborne receiver. A hold is recommended pending the same editorial ruling that gnss-spoofing-maritime-2016-2019 awaits.
Attack vector
Transmission of counterfeit civil GPS signals from a briefcase-sized device on the vessel's upper deck, shaped to match the authentic signals and raised in power until the ship's two GPS receivers tracked them instead.
Operational impact
The vessel's reported position and the crew's electronic chart display were controlled by the researchers. The yacht deviated from its intended track by hundreds of metres onto a parallel course without any alarm being raised on board.
Affected segments
user, link
Disclosed
2013-07-29
SPARTA techniques evidenced
Each row is a technique this record evidences, with the reasoning and the source that attests to it.
What relationship, confidence, and evidence mean on the rows below
- Relationship
What kind of link this is between the technique and the target.
Mitigates: the target actively prevents, detects, or recovers from the technique.
Addresses: the target governs the technique or is relevant to it, without interdicting it. Most governance and policy obligations sit here.
Triggers obligation: the technique occurring is what triggers the duty the target imposes.
Relates to: related to the technique, but the target neither interdicts nor governs it. Used sparingly.
- Confidence
How strongly the source supports this mapping, not how severe the technique is.
High: the source supports the mapping squarely.
Moderate: supported, with a qualification such as a cross-tactic reading that stays operationally sound.
Low: the source reaches the technique only in part.
- Evidence
How close to the source text the mapping was made.
Direct: a verbatim excerpt of the cited source was read against the technique, and the rationale argues from that excerpt.
Derived: the mapping follows from the source's scope or structure, with no on-point excerpt addressing the technique.
Inferred: reached by composition through another framework, or by domain reasoning the source does not support on its face.
The technique's own target list names GNSS among the position sensors to which an attacker may present fabricated or biased measurements that estimation and control treat as ground truth. That is what occurred: the ship's navigation system read the counterfeit fix as truth, presented it on the electronic chart as a course deviation, and the crew's corrective steering was the actual course change. SPARTA's own bibliography places this incident at EX-0014.03. Derived because the technique scopes the consuming estimator to the spacecraft's. SCOPE FLAG: drops if the editor rules terrestrial-victim GNSS events out of scope.
The team broadcast a faint ensemble of counterfeit civil GPS signals toward the ship's two GPS antennas and raised them in power until they overpowered the authentic signals without triggering an alarm, after which the reported position was moved to attacker-chosen values. That is the technique's transmitting clause and its believable-code-phase-and-navigation-message clause, met in a controlled field experiment. The victim is a shipborne receiver, not the spacecraft navigation solution the technique names, so the edge is derived rather than direct. SCOPE FLAG: drops entirely if the editor rules terrestrial-victim GNSS events out of SPARTA scope.
IMP-0001 is falsification of information into a system to induce a reaction prejudicial to the affected party's interests. Humphreys's account is that definition in one sentence: the ship turned and the crew could feel it, while the chart display and the crew saw only a straight line, because the crew were steering to correct a deviation that did not exist. No source uses the word deception, so the edge is derived. Not affected by the spacecraft-victim scope question; IMP-0001 is an impact technique, not a segment-scoped one.
Considered and not mapped
These techniques were considered for this record because a source, a related record or SPARTA's own catalogue pointed at them. Each was read against what the sources say and not mapped. The reason is given in full.
The technique is message injection with valid identifiers onto an internal data bus. No source describes anything reaching the ship's internal buses; the attack is entirely at the RF front end of the GPS receivers. SPARTA's bibliography cites this incident here, and the citation is context, not evidence.
The technique is compromise of the victim's SDR-based transceiver, through its development pipeline, integration or update channel. The software-defined radio in this experiment is the attacker's own briefcase transmitter, built for the purpose. Nothing on the yacht was compromised. Mapping this would invert the technique.
Nothing was impaired. The whole point of the demonstration is that the navigation system kept working, raised no alarm, and lied. Mapping disruption would misdescribe the event as a degradation when it is a deception.
No commercial ground network or ground-station-as-a-service was rented or misused. The transmitter was a briefcase-sized device the team carried aboard.
Sources
The published accounts this record rests on. The tier is SafeMode Space's own assessment of the source, and the reason for it is given beside it. What the tiers mean and how they are assigned: the source tiers.
A source is listed when a mapped technique rests on it, or when it disputes the account. One the curators read but neither cited nor recorded as disputing the record is not listed, so an absence here means neither is true rather than that nobody looked.
Tier 2: First-party account by the institution that conducted the experiment, naming the researchers, the vessel, the location and the method, and quoting the principal investigator. Not peer-reviewed and not independent of the participants, so not Tier 1.
- Hostile Control of Ships via False GPS Signals: Demonstration and DetectionPeer-reviewed papersupporting
Tier 1: Peer-reviewed paper in NAVIGATION, the journal of the Institute of Navigation, reporting a field experiment in which a vessel's GPS receiver was captured by counterfeit signals, and proposing a detection method.
Tier 3: Technology desk of the Norwegian public broadcaster, reporting its own analysis of Black Sea AIS data with expert commentary. Secondary where it describes published experiments by others.
Every source SafeMode Space reproduces, and on what terms: sources and attribution.