I think there's more to that drone spoofing story. Not that I don't believe what we're told... If it was so easy it would have been a lot more than one drone by now. Or maybe it has been...
That was a military drone presumably using an authenticated signal; it wasn't easy. There's no evidence is was the Iranians who did the spoof either.
It's just a drone anyway, they expect to lose them.
They don't expect to lose them intact and undamaged, ready for enemy evaluation and reverse engineering to find weaknesses.
Speaking more generally now. What I got out of that spoofing doc linked to above was that a single spoofing source would not be enough. A modern GPS receiver should quickly ignore it.
A single antenna suffices to spoof civilian GPS. Anything large enough for two GPS receivers could detect simple spoofing by comparing position solutions and known receiver separations.
A diligent GPS receiver might detect and reject a clumsy spoof but not a careful spoof takeover.
Multiple signal sources *in the proper geometric locations* would normally be required.
Not locations: GPS is all about *timing*. The signal sources can be anywhere you want as long as the signals arrive at the receiver with the right timing relative to each other.
With an authenticated GPS signal, where you can't change the satellite position data in the signal, you can jam the signals and send a delayed copy to the GPS receiver, tinkering with the relative timing of each satellite's signal so that the receiver solves for the position you want. It's tough to do, but apparently not tough enough.
Back to the drone: they apparently didn't have to do that, and it responded to its confusion by landing. I wonder if the Iranians made the landing place look fairly like the base where the drone would have normally landed? I thought there was always people behind the drones' control who could over-ride their autonomy.
The drones will autonomously return to base in the event of loss of command signal. A pilot is not needed.
The attack apparently jammed the command signal and then spoofed the GPS receiver so that when the drone tried to fly back to base it was really just flying in circles in Iranian airspace, and when the drone thought it was landing at home it was in fact spoofed to land at an Iranian airbase.
The Radionavigation Lab result is noteworthy as it was an entirely civilian effort by one professor and fewer than half-a-dozen students.
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