Can the Reverse-engineered Starlink seen as backup for GPS : A matter of Security flaw, exploited in Ukraine
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"As time goes on and their dependence on Starlink deepens, Ukraine and its allies in the West are coming to appreciate that they have little control over Starlink and know little about it," Humphreys told MIT Technology Review. "But now many millions have a vested interest in Starlink security, including its resilience to jamming.
"Humphreys has done a big service to the navigation community identifying these sequences," Mark Psiaki, an aerospace professor at Virginia Tech and GPS expert told MIT Technology Review. "But any navigation system working on open-source sequences could definitely be spoofed, because everyone will know how to spot those signals and create fake ones."
Starlink has become such an integral part of wartime communications in Ukraine that recent outages were described as "catastrophic" by officials. Musk tweeted this week Russia is "actively working" to destroy the satellites, but Humphreys' discovery — that the signals are predictable and replicable — highlights the possibility for intentional disruption of Starlink.
