NCyTE Member Meeting: Satellites, Positioning, GNSS vs GPS, and Potential Security Vulnerabilities

NCyTE Member Meeting: Satellites, Positioning, GNSS vs GPS, and Potential Security Vulnerabilities

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activities and so Vincent Donato is going to talk about uh the satellite positioning and data acquisition uh and we'll go ahead and turn it over to him I guess you have to stop sharing Mike so he can put his presentation up okay give me just a second yeah I'm not seeing my shares yeah we see a year oh you are okay I've just not seen a green band around my slide so you're seeing my slides yes okay super super all right as noted I'm Vince dinoto I'm actually in Southern Indiana what we call the Sunny Side of the Ohio River um so I live in Jeffersonville Indiana and working from my home office today and so we're going to talk about geospatial security and obviously some of the points that I'm going to talk about are those points that were on the previous slide as noted I am the director of the Geotech Center my email address is here if you want to get in contact with me I also work with ncat your next presentation in April I'm a co-princel investigator for that Grant so I decided to change my slides yesterday and I figured I couldn't start this talk without having something about balloons so this is the balloon that was off of South Carolina you can see the U.S military aircraft there and um you know what is this what is the security risk I don't think anybody knows at this moment you know we've also shot down three other balloon type objects so um but it does raise the question about security um how secure are we how secure is our data and how can you change that data um to let people think they're one place when they're really a different place so that's some of the stuff that we'll talk about sorry so just a quick slide about what is geospatial Technologies what is GIS sometimes called geospatial Science and Technology it seems like we can't get our name what to a single name it has evolved over the years but basically anything that we can put on a map is GIS but if you think of GIS as just something that you can put on a map then you're really shortchanging the science that's here so a sense of place an x y z coordinate a temporal location Vector data in raster data Vector data has a starting point and basically a length and has an angle to it where raster data is more what we're going to be talking about today which is really more pictures um so we're talking about raster information analysis just collecting the data just [Music] um understanding where it was taken really doesn't do anything for us it's the analysis today most of that analysis is computerized a lot of it's moving into the AI field but it started off being people looking at on film so the analysis has changed in our science is really driven by software and Hardware um you know massive Computing is being done um the software is changing it seems almost on the hour that it's actually now changing on the monthly basis at least the software that most people are using to do geospatial technology and I intentionally chose the source for this as being the CDC instead of being some geospatial organization because we think of the CDC with the covid virus and everything but a lot of GIS was done during the pandemic for example most of you probably at some point went to the John Hopkins dashboard to see what was going on that was an example of using geospatial data but it was a matter of looking at graphs it was a matter of looking at charts in some mapping but it really was much more sophisticated than just looking at a bunch of maps with maybe dots on it showing how many cases there was in a certain area it was really an analysis tool that could be done on the Fly yeah so some of the things I'm going to talk about today is I'm going to talk about what is GPS slash gnss because we really use this term wrong um and so we'll talk about a little bit about GPS and gnss and how you can hijack this so what is coming down to us on the data Pipeline and how can you hijack this data we're going to talk about remotely since data a lot of our data that we get is not data that is us going out and measuring it directly but it's coming from aircrafts drones potentially satellites so we're going to talk about remotely since data and then we're going to talk about open sourced maps and in some ways we're going to be talking about ethics as part of that because what is ethical to share for example when you're at a in a war so as we look at what's going on with the Ukrainian Russia right now and we look at the open source mapping that's there what is appropriate and what's inappropriate that we should be sharing there's not a right answer there's not a wrong answer to that but it's something that we should think about so let me start with talking about global positioning satellites um and it looks like I have a typo there I left off the G in GPS when we talk about GPS we talk about this is the constellation of satellites that's around the Earth but that's really not the correct term to be using we should be using gnss Global navigation Satellite Systems because the GPS satellites are only those of the United States and if you look here on this um slide you can see all the different other constellations that are out there China's got their constellation galileos the European constellation Russia's got theirs India Japan and to some degree the UK Australia the Republic of Korea so on and so forth they all have their own global positioning satellites out there and the GPS satellites really are the 24 that represent the United States as this diagram shows here and I'm not sure why it's not automated right now but it shows these satellites are constantly orbiting the Earth and when I use my phone I pick up my phone and I look at my position I may be connecting to two Russian satellites five U.S satellites it's hard to say uh but their signals are open in general they're not masks that you can't use them but in general most of these signals are all open the United States right now is in the process of upgrading its um satellites putting new satellites in taking old satellites out of service and so over the next several years you'll see that this is um changing whoops so as I said there's 24 satellites that orbit the earth if a satellite dies we do have a couple spares in out in space that we can replace it with and reposition how that satellite's orbiting but in general the GPS is 24 satellites the US satellites so what are we getting when I pick up my phone and I look that I'm connected when I look at my location on my phone what is my phone receiving my phone is receiving a time stamp so if I know the time it took for that signal to get from the satellite to where I'm at and by knowing that time I can know a distance but that's one distance so we've got a single satellite sitting out here in space and we know the distance from that satellite to my position on the Earth but it's not just my position it's a sphere because we have one radius and we have a sphere that is at Radio distance now only part of that radius intersects the Earth so a single satellite doesn't give me anything if I take a second satellite that I know it's precise position in space and I know it's time stamp I know it's distance away from me and now I can start doing some triangularization I'm somewhere along a line if I bring another satellite in I can get to I'm somewhere on this plane a single point on this plane but I don't know exactly um where I'm at elevation wise and I bring a four satellite into my calculations and now I can start to develop a three-dimensional model so once I developed that model the more satellites I bring the more precise my location becomes but it's all based upon time it is all my monodirectional I'm only receiving information I'm not sending any information back to that satellite so that's a misunderstanding that a lot of people have they assume that you're communicating back in space so for example if you're in a large truck what's that large truck is doing it's receiving its position because it has a GPS antenna but it then also usually connected to some type of satellite cell phone or satellite phone and it's sending that back to the company what its position is so it's constantly communicating with the company um I'm a bike rider and so one of the things I can do when I go out for a ride is I can let my wife know by an app that I'm going out for a ride and she can actually monitor my position so my phone is receiving these time stamps from the GPS satellites it knows my position as I'm riding it's using the cellular capacity of my phone then to send an information back to my wife's phone and that she can watch where I'm actually riding and so actually the way I have my bike set up is if I'm stopped for more than three minutes it sends an alert to my wife saying that I'm stopped that maybe something's wrong I get a phone call in general so you can see how that type of situation works we can also have ground base stations so if you're trying to land an instrument Landing of an airplane at an airport you're probably connecting to what's known as a wide area augmentation system the waas in that system then gives you ground-based information along with the cellular information to give you a more precise location of where you're at if you're into agriculture one of the things that you might do is you might put a base station on the corner of a field and you might have a combine that is self-driving and that combine then takes um and drives the um down the field a bit to know its position more accurately than what you can get just using um the GPS for example um we put ground-based stations that we precisely know where they are at and then I mentioned a couple others accuracy today can approach one centimeter that's pretty accurate one centimeter again it depends on the number of satellites depends on the ground stations you might be connecting to there's a lot of things that it depends up on in When the GPS satellites were first put in space we blocked the last digit we the federal government blocked the last digit coming there on the timestamp so we couldn't get as many decimal places if you would for our accuracy therefore the original GPS units did not see as accurate a signal as we see today and therefore what happened was excuse me what happened there was that we were maybe within a few feet of where we were we weren't within a centimeter or 10 centimeters or so um of where we actually proved position back in 2000 the U.S quit blocking that last digit and now we have a much more accurate position that can be used by surveyors and other people such like that so the security we all have well not maybe not everybody but we have phones they're receiving this information we got these precise positions we know we're talking about self-driving cars um we need to have accurate maps for that we need to have good GPS information for that but what happens from a security standpoint what can you do to that signal so that I don't know where I really am so one of the things you can do is you can jam the G in SS or GPS if we're talking about just the United States constellation you can basically by knowing the wavelength that's coming from space to your device if somebody puts a very intense Source it's broadcasting that wavelength all of a sudden you can jam the signal that's the true signal because you've got this other signal that is basically garbage and therefore it doesn't receive the signal from the satellites so you can jam the gnss system you can also do what um denial service denial service can be that you write a new signal that's going out and that new signal that's being received tells it you can connect to the satellite it gives bad information basically and therefore again it's blocking what's coming from space and we get um this denial R you can do what was done um in the Black Sea area and I'll talk about that in a little bit more detail in just a moment you can come in here and you can tell it oh here's my time stamp and by giving it enough different time stamps the person using the gnss system thinks they're somewhere else so if you think about today's Weaponry a lot of these GPS driven well if we can tell the weapon it's one it's in a different place than where it truly is therefore you can um change where that weapon is targeting so one of the concerns is how do you fix that in a company called here is working on that and this is one of their slides um basically don't use just the GPS or the gnss but also use Wi-Fi and Cellular in networks that all have to have positions associated with them and by you getting signals from all these different positions you can then be much more accurate this started was because when you're in a downtown with tall buildings the buildings send the block a lot of the gnss signals so you have this Canyon effect and so why this research was started was well if I'm driving down a city street and I've got tall buildings around me I might not know where I'm at because I'm blocking quite a few satellites and I can only see those that are directly overhead and therefore by creating another system like using cell phone towers and things you can help um guide where you're truly located and things like that so you're going to see a lot more of this type of Technology both from the jamming of signals but also as we look at driving you know if you have a self-driving vehicle you don't want it not to know where you're at when you're going down a city street so this is coming so is this real yes during the beginnings of the Ukraine Russian war um there was a lot of jamming going on in by this jamming it was giving false position but not only did it give false position in the Ukraine but um the Black Sea area Eastern Finland um foreign okay let me continue the Baltic area the Mediterranean Cyprus turkey Lebanon Syria and Israel as well as Northern Iraq all was having problems with being jammed so that's a large percentage of the country by jamming it then you can no longer use your gns system which doesn't just affect where ground troops are but it affects aircraft effects Weaponry on how they are being targeted so um this happened about exactly a year ago so let me stop there and see what kind of questions you might have or if we have any questions right now before we go into the next topic you can put your questions in the chat or just uh unmute yourself and ask the question [Music] okay not hearing any at this moment I will continue um so the next topic or area I want to talk a little bit about is the topic of remote sensing of how data has changed and to give you a little bit of a historical perspective on this so some of our first imagery that was taken was taken by either hot air balloons are taken by kites so so they had cameras on the Kites and you can see a little piece of a image here that was taken by a kite but you can see um that that was one way of obviously getting up above the ground to get a bigger perspective if you um are a civil war historian you know that the Union Army had um balloons that they used to also look even though they didn't very effectively use them but they also used them to look at enemy positions this is a true picture um the next area that we used was using pigeons they would actually strap cameras on pigeons they would set a timing circuit on the camera so every so many minutes or maybe it was in seconds it would take a picture and eventually the pigeon would return home they would take the camera off the pigeon and they would um develop the film and this was aerial reconnaissance to work and you can see some of these type of pictures that were obtained by pigeons so pigeons were our first animals at least used to do um remote sensing then in the late 50s early 60s we placed spy planes you two um was the model of the plane that was used at high elevations flying at 70 000 feet or higher and this is a picture of a U2 plane at some points in time the U2 planes were controlled by the CIA later they became instruments of the United States Air Force in other countries we're doing some similar things but not probably as high as what the U.S planes were flying

a couple of these planes had were shot down one over the Soviet Union and one over Cuba so then comes October of 1962 I'm not sure how many of you are old enough to remember this I just vaguely remember what was going on in 1962 um but this image here shows some of the first detection of missiles in Cuba so we're now using remote sense data for geo and Geo intelligence I've given you a few links here that you can read more about this but it was decided that the imagery we had from the U2 spy planes were not good enough to share with the American public so President Kennedy ordered the Navy and the Air Force to fly jet fighters that had been equipped with a bunch of cameras at a thousand feet over Cuba at 500 miles per hour and as I was researching some of this for this presentation it surprised me that there is film that really has never been looked at that was flowing there was lots of sorties flowing over Cuba during October of 62. and some of that film has really never been looked at that film is all in the National Archives and since it's been enough years those items are now released to the public but they don't publish a list of numbers you have to sort of know their numbering system to be able to figure out where that film is in the National Archives it's in a cold storage I believe in Kansas if I remember correctly another thought that was developed was if we could put satellites up in space um and had these satellites taking pictures of troubled areas or puts a satellite in a geosynchronous orbit potentially but have the satellites taking pictures well at that time satellite technology wasn't to the or I should say optic technology wasn't to the point that we could be doing what we do today with satellites and that being that we have a solid state chips on this um satellite and it receives the information and it transmits that information back to the Earth instead we were still doing film type imagery with satellites and so I'm going to show you a piece of a video um this is kind of a neat little video three two one zero the dollar as they existed there do not what's President Eisenhower made the decision to take photos from satellites the inner road then face the technical challenge of getting those images safely back to Earth where they could be analyzed by awaiting photo interpreters and ingenious they have rather Simple Solution emerged throughout the undeveloped film in a bucket and have an airplane snag it in midair before slashed into the sea okay it's going about 200 feet a second this is the story of the bucket catchers and their historic last kha Gambit catch in April 1986. I mean I found so much pressure don't mess up just in your chance okay we'll stop it there because it goes for about five and a half minutes um so you're welcome to take a look at that if you'd like it's up on YouTube and so we dropped buckets containing undeveloped film and basically c135 aircraft I'm sorry C-130 aircraft I believe it was um hooked on to the parachute reeled it back into the airplane and we did this until 1986 even though we had started developing solid-state Optical detection devices that had reasonable resolution but they still didn't have the resolution that we had on film and for this type of work we needed that resolution so at this time we're flying high-flying aircraft and we have satellites um in orbit is how we're getting data about what's going on in the world so I want to take you through a little bit of an exercise here on the amount of data that we capture in the resolution of the data so the resolution I'm also going to show you in some imagery in just a moment but if we use a landsat satellite and we still have landsat satellites and we use them a lot for agriculture and other purposes each of their pixels is 30 meters on the side so a single picture pixel element represents 900 square meters basically about four pixels would Encompass on the entire football field well then it comes along the Sentinel satellites which are still orbiting their image size is about 10 meters so each pixel has a much better resolution about nine times better because we're looking at 100 square meters and basically a football field now takes 44 pixels to cover it you're starting to get a little bit better resolution digital Globe another satellite system we're looking at about a foot resolution or we got 9 375 pixels representing the same area as what we I'm yeah that's right I'm representing the area of the single landsat image and you know about 7000 pixels now represent a football field we go to aircraft aircraft is anywhere today between two inches and about six inches depending on the elevation the aircraft's flying at and we're talking about in general low-flying aircraft we're talking about 15 centimeters or about 40 000 pixels to represent that football field and if we go to uncrewed aircraft now we're talking about about a half an inch and we're looking at 6 million plus pixels to represent that football field I'm sorry to represent the same size area as one single Lancet pixel we also now can steer air satellites our aircraft and we can set pathways we also can vary the color depth so initially we had 8-bit color um usually the way it's done it was three sensors to get eight bit color and we can then move to 10 sensors and some things are now up to 16 uh bit resolution we still have problems with weather that problems with weather can be both for ground-based aircraft and uas's a bit also with satellites if there's a cloud passing under that satellite we get no data and we can have multiple sensors both in the visible range the near infrared range which is great for agriculture on and plant use and the thermal infrared range but as we think about security of information who can see this information so let me first show you a visual of this and then let's talk a little bit about the information so here's a landsat image you cannot make much out from the single landsat image if you were looking at a big field of crops yeah you could determine some things about this field but if you found an area let's say that had disease in it or like where my mouse is I'm moving you might have to remove 30 meters um by 30 meter area that's a small Street removed so you're probably going to remove at least 10 times out of here that's a big part of a field that you might have to remove the information or remove the crop from Sentinel same same location on the earth Sentinel much better resolution digital globe you can now start to make out the individual buildings this is by the way my campus um my office sits right there we go to aircraft this is um three inch data so you can start to see even higher resolution and if we go to an uncrewed aerial vehicle you can get even much more precise you can almost get down to the individual leaves on the tree so as we get this better resolution we get this better information it really changes the intelligence community so here I've got two images of a bridge in the Ukraine everybody see and this um information was taken by maxar so what this is is a bridge that's right in this general area here this is the Google image notice it shows that the bridge is blocked our slow traffic but you can no longer say um no this didn't happen because today open source satellites are taking imagery in real time and showing us what the true effects are um the angles are actually reversed on let me make sure I'm saying that right yes um the picture these two pictures are 180 degrees out of phase with one another so it was just this is just raw imagery that Iris found from a speaker that I used on a presentation for my Center and you can see okay now I'm showing real time now we need to think a little bit about that ethics question is this something that we should be publishing we can debate that one way or the other bit you can see the type of data that can be collected in real time and let me move then to this ethics question a little bit more this is open street map I'm not sure if you're familiar with openstreetmap openstreetmap is an open source um mapping program it creates citizen scientists collecting information mapping that information and this is a vectorized mapping done and then to make it run faster the vectors are made into rasters so that you actually have an image that you're looking at here instead of just a bunch of vector information this is updated in real time and if you look real careful and I don't know if you can notice it on your screen but like over in this area right here you can see these lines what are those lines those are power transmission lines this is open source I gathered this information um a week ago maybe 10 days ago I'm in the Ukraine I'm north of Kiev and I am seeing transmission lines you can see every individual building who plotted all this information it was plotted by individuals it's not taken from other data sources this is basically plotted by a group of individuals who can plot it anybody that wants to sign on can plot it is there misinformation plotted here potentially but again it raises that question should we blur areas or should we keep them at Full Resolution and as you look at this area if you weren't aware the area I'm looking at this is Chernobyl where the power plant accident occurred years ago and finally if we move down to here this is what Google Earth of the same region does they don't show the individual buildings basically on the same type of a zoom level but they do show where the power plant was and things like that but they show a little bit less detail they show still major roads though so those are all showing the show water features very accurately and so Google Map can have individuals helping with the data sources and things like that but it's not completely open source like osm is completely open source so let me stop at that point show you a couple things here my email address feel free to contact me my centers URL we're putting our program on in April called Earth observation day you can register in fact following that length or find out more about that program we're also doing a bunch of professional development events and you can find out more by doing that hyperlink and finally um we're putting together a teacher's certification program which will start in May and again you can find out more at the professional development link so I'll stop at that point and try to answer any questions that you might have again you can put your questions in chat or unmute and ask the question Vincent I had one question around uh just when you're talking about the security uh from the satellite perspective is there they have a way to monitor the the satellites and and the data to see if there's any uh disruption uh from some kind of a central control system uh well that's that's one of the issues cause all right this we're talking about the G NSS satellites they're just sending out timestamp constantly sending out time stand for and then other devices are determining that so it's the local device that gets jammed it's not the the satellite that data is still coming from the satellite we're not jamming the satellite we're jamming the receiver and so therefore sometimes unless a military or an operation that's looking at high resolution image review are not imagery data for positions starts finding issues um it's not knowing that it's um being jammed unless that signals the jamming signals picked up by someone who does something about it you know it could be nothing more if I'm using my cell phone and using my position location and also it looks like I'm three blocks away from my house and I'm not really on the right Street you know we tend to say nothing I wonder what's going on there we don't think about but that could very well been jammed um the Somali pirates um back several years ago when they were taking ships and things they made the ship think it was in one place when it was in a different place so therefore when they sent out sos's um some of it was sent sending people to the wrong location not where the ship truly was okay that sounds uh logical with the uh I was you were talking about ships uh if you uh you can buy these heapers that help locate you is that how do they do that they tie that off of a satellite uh image to uh I know I've helped my son sail his uh sailboat for Mobile Alabama to New York City and uh we had Evers on board which supposed to be if if uh we had serious problems we could activate the aper and the Coast Guard could be called out is that same principle right it's basically the same Principle as what we're talking about like with trucks and things like that it's getting a it's determining your position by using gnss satellites and then if something happens with whatever parameters they put in there um something happens like you don't communicate with somebody let's say for six hours or whatever then it automatically sends a call to the Coast Guard or with your last position knowing position and things like that so it's sort of the same thing I was talking about when I go bike riding um that I can have signals sent to my wife when I'm not moving okay do anyone else have any questions it's new to this group I think as far as from a Securities perspective let's see I think we had something good well if there's no other questions uh Stephen I uh not necessarily a question but uh this is the same type technology Apple's building into their Apple Watch series eight uh for hikers uh if they get in trouble they can uh they can ping a satellite to get help to them exactly I now I think they're using some type of a satellite cell phone in in the watch on to do that because obviously if you were just doing cell cellular towers and you're out in the middle of nowhere that's not going to be much good for you so I think it's communicating via satellite cell phone and not um traditional cell phone technology it is it is hitting a satellite because they um uh they got you know some procedures it's still fairly new because they just rolled it out in their recent phones and uh the and they have a ruggedized watch that bikers will wear and that helps them yeah and let me just make sure I re-emphasize because I've seen this misprint in many places the gnss satellites themselves are monodirectional they're only sending data to the receiver they the receiver doesn't communicate with that satellite so there is the watch or the cell phone is actually communicating with you know a different satellite okay uh uh one other thing I was thinking about uh you know we have different standards for security uh like nist standard 800s series or something like that is there something like that that they have for satellite security and and best practices not that I've seen but I don't I'm not a person that hasn't I don't have enough knowledge to know for sure if there is anything there but nothing that I've came across in my research and things okay okay anyone else have a uh any questions well Vincent thank you uh that was very interesting I think some uh something to think about and another area of of uh of security uh that we need to think about and uh so I'm going to turn this back over to uh Mike for his any Final Act uh comments uh thank you Stephen well you know my final comment is thank you for attending today's member meeting we have more member meetings coming up and we'd like to um see you attend those as well if you do have some feedback I dropped a link in the chat please click on that and send us your information um about you know events that you want to see coming up maybe you're interested in presenting on a topic um we'd love to get your feedback on that uh with that I don't have anything else to add to the meeting thank you Vincent again for presenting it was very helped um satellites and geospatial Technology and the implications of that with everything that are going so thank you everybody I won't keep you any longer I'll give you back some of your time um have a great weekend thank you thank you

2023-03-09 12:23

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