Todd Humphreys predicts the near future of geolocation when his dots GPS with millimeter accuracy they will allow you to find areas and spots of your friends or not, show exactly where you are, or track people without their knowledge. And the answer to the sinister side of it technology it can have many unwanted consequences.
This speech was presented to his local audience TEDxAustin, as an independent event.
Todd Humphreys is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering at the University of Texas. Todd is studying GPS, his future, and how we can tackle some of his biggest security problems.
0: 12 Something happened in the early morning hours at 2 May of 2000, which deeply affected the way our society is working. Ironically, almost nobody noticed it at the time. The change was silent, subtle, unless you knew exactly what to look for. That morning, US President Bill Clinton ordered a special switch to be sent to the tracking satellites of the Global Positioning System. Immediately, the GPS receiver of every citizen in the world improved by going from field size bugs to small room size bugs.
0: 53 It's hard to overestimate the impact that this change has on the precision in our lives. Before this switch was sent, we did not have navigation systems in our car giving turn-by-turn instructions, because then, GPS could not tell you which square you were, let alone which street.
1: 09 For geolocation, precision is important, and conditions have only been improved in the last 10 years. With more base stations, more ground stations, better receivers and algorithms, GPS now can not only tell you which street you are in, but also which part of the road.
1: 28 This level of accuracy has released a storm of innovations. Indeed, many of you have come here today with the help of TomTom or your smart mobile. Printed maps have become obsolete.
1:43 But now we're on the brink of a new revolution in geolocation accuracy. What would you do if I told you that the placement per two meters that our current cell phones and TomToms give us is pathetic compared to what we could have? For some time now, it has been known that if you pay attention to the phase of the GPS signal carrier, and if you have connection on the internet, then you can go from placement per meter to placement per centimeter, even per millimeter.
2: 13 Why do not we have this feature on our phones? Only, I believe, because of a lack of imagination. Manufacturers have not introduced this carrier wave phase technique into their GPS chips because they are not sure what the general public would do with geolocation so expensive that you can spot the wrinkles in the palm of your hand. But you and I and other innovators can see the prospects of this next leap in precision. Imagine, for example, an augmented reality application that overlaps with a digital world of millimeter accuracy over the natural world. I could show you here in a three-dimensional structure, accurate to a millimeter, which only you could see, or my friends at home.
2: 58 So we are looking for this level of placement, and I think that over the next few years, this super-precise, phase-based wave will become economical and ubiquitous, and the consequences will be fantastic.
3: 17 The Holy Grail is, of course, the GPS dot. Do you remember the movie "Da Vinci Code"? That's where Professor Langdon examines a GPS dot, which, as his teammate says, is a precise tracking device half a meter away anywhere on the planet, but we know that in the real world, the GPS dot is impossible, right? On the one hand, the GPS does not work indoors, and on the other hand, not so small devices are manufactured, especially when they have to carry their measurements through a network.
3: 51 Well, these objections were perfectly reasonable a few years ago, but things have changed. There is a significant current in favor of the reduction, better sensitivity, so that, some years ago, a GPS tracking device looked like this bulky box to the left of the keys. Compare it to the device that was released a few months ago now having the keycase size, and if you notice the extraordinary version of an integrated GPS receiver that is one centimeter long and is more sensitive than ever, you understand that the GPS dot will soon go through imagination in reality.
4: 30 Imagine what we could do with a world full of GPS dots. It's not just that you do not have your wallet or keys again, or your kid when you're in Disneyland. You will buy GPS bullets with the pound, and you will place them on anything you own worth more than a few tens of dollars.
4: 49 Now I could not find my shoes, and, as usual, I had to ask my wife if she had seen them. But I should not bother my husband with such insignificances. I should be able to ask my house where my shoes are. (Laughs)
5: 04 Those of you who are now using Gmail remember how relieving the transition from organizing all of their messages to finding them simply through search. The GPS dot will do the same for our belongings.
5: 19 Of course there is a negative aspect of the GPS dot. I was in my office a few months ago and I accepted a call. The woman who had taken me, let's say Carol, was panicked. Apparently, a Carol Carolian ex-girlfriend had found her in Texas and followed her everywhere. So maybe you ask yourself why he got me. Well, I also wondered. But there seemed to be a technical aspect in the case of Carol. Every time her ex-boyfriend appeared, the most unappealing moments and the most unlikely places, he carried an open laptop with him, and over time Carol understood that he had placed a GPS tracking device in her car, so he called me for help at to neutralize it.
6: 07 "Well, go to a good mechanic and see your car," I said.
6: 13 "I already did it," she told me. "He did not find anything obvious, and he said he should dismantle the vehicle completely."
6: 21 "Well, then go to the police," I said.
6: 24 "I already went," he replied. "They are not sure if this is pure harassment and they do not have the technical equipment to find the device."
6: 34 "Okay, then at the FBI?"
6: 35 "I also talked with them, and the result itself".
6: 39 We then decided to come to my lab and do a scan of her car but I was not even sure if this would work, since some of these devices are set to transmit only when they are in safe zones or when the car is moving.
6: 54 That was the situation, then. Carroll is not the first, and it will certainly not be the last one to be found in such a terrifying environment, a worrying situation caused by GPS.
7: 09 Indeed, as I looked at her case, I discovered to my surprise that it is not necessarily illegal for you or me to place a tracking device in someone else's car. The Supreme Court has determined last month that a police officer should get a warrant if he wants to do extensive surveillance but the law is not clear for civilian use, so you should not worry only about the Big Brother but also about Big Neighbor. (Laughs)
7: 36 There is an alternative that Carroll could choose, very effective. It's called Wave Bubble. It is an open source GPS interferometer, developed by Limo Friet, a MIT postgraduate student, and Limor calls it "a tool to regain our personal space." At the touch of a switch, you create a bubble around you in which the GPS signals do not work. They are blowing from the bubble. And Limor drew it up, partly because, like Carol, she felt she was being threatened by GPS tracking. Then she published her plan on the internet, and if you do not have time to make your own, you can buy one. Chinese manufacturers today sell thousands of similar devices online.
8: 26 So you might think, the Wave Bubble sounds like a nice idea. Let me get one. It can be useful if someone installs GPS in my car. But you should know that its use is totally illegal in the United States. And why is this happening? Well, because it's basically not a bubble. Its interference signal does not stop at the edges of your personal space or on the edges of your car. It interferes with innocent GPS receivers miles away from you. (Laughs)
8: 54 Now, if you are Carroll or Limor, or someone who feels threatened by GPS tracking, you may not be wrong to activate a Wave Bubble, but in reality, the results may be disastrous. Imagine, for example, that you are the captain of a ship and try to drive through dense fog and a passenger activates a Wave Bubble. Suddenly the GPS indication goes out, and now you're alone with the fog along with anything you can see on the radar if you remember how it works. In fact, the beacons are no longer upgraded or maintained and LORAN, the only alternative to GPS, ceased technically last year.
9:41 Modern society has a distinct relationship with GPS. We rely on it almost blindly. This is deeply structured within our systems and infrastructures. Some call it the "invisible service". Therefore, activating a Wave Bubble may not only cause discomfort. It can prove fatal.
10: 04 But ultimately, to protect your privacy against the reliability of other GPS, there is something even more effective and subversive than a Wave Bubble, and that's the GPS fake.
10: 21 The GPS counterfeit logic is simple. Instead of blocking GPS signals, you are fake them. You imitate them, and if you do it correctly, the device you are attacking will not even know that a sucker has been caught.
10: 34 Let me show you how it works. On any GPS receiver, there is a peak corresponding to the original signals. These three red dots represent the tracking points that try to stay focused on this top. But if you send a fake GPS signal, another peak is displayed, and if you can perfectly align the two peaks, tracking points can not understand the difference, and they are controlled by the strongest false signal while the original peak is overridden. At this point, everything is over. False signals now completely control this GPS receiver.
11:12 Είναι λοιπόν αυτό όντως δυνατό; Μπορεί κάποιος πράγματι να χειραγωγήσει το χρονισμό και την τοποθέτηση ενός δέκτη GPS τόσο εύκολα, με έναν πλαστογράφο; Λοιπόν, εν συντομία η απάντηση είναι ναι. Το ζήτημα είναι πως τα αστικά σήματα GPS είναι παντελώς ελεύθερα. Δεν διαθέτουν κρυπτογράφηση. Δεν διαθέτουν procedure ελέγχου ταυτότητας. Είναι απόλυτα ανοιχτά, ευάλωτα σε μια επίθεση πλαστού σήματος. Μολαταύτα, μέχρι πολύ πρόσφατα, κανένας δεν ανησυχούσε για τους πλαστογράφους GPS. Ο κόσμος πίστευε ότι η κατασκευή του θα ήταν υπερβολικά περίπλοκη ή υπερβολικά δαπανηρή για κάποιον χάκερ.
11: 43 But a postgraduate friend and I didn't share the same opinion. We knew it wouldn't be so difficult, and we wanted to be the first to build it to help face the problem and help protect against GPS forgeries. I vividly remember the week everything happened. We made it home, which means I had a little help from my three-year-old son Ramon. Here's Ramon - (Laughter) - asking for some attention from Dad that week. In the beginning, the forger was just a mess of cables and computers, though in the end we put it in a small box.
12: 24 Now, Dr. Frankenstein's moment when the forger finally worked and I saw his scary potential arrived late one night when I tried the forgery against my iPhone. Let me show you an original shot from that first experiment. I was accustomed to fully trusting this little blue dot and the reassuring blue circle around her. It was like talking to me. As if to say, "Here you are. Here you are". (Laughter) And "you can trust us". So something seemed completely wrong. It was almost like betrayal when this little blue dot started at my home and moved quickly to the north leaving me behind. I was not moving. What I saw then in this moving blue dot was the possibility of chaos. I saw planes and ships going out of their way, with the captain learning very slowly that something went wrong. I saw the New York Stock Exchange GPS synchronization being manipulated by hackers. You can hardly imagine the loss that you could have caused if you knew how to use a GPS forgery.
13:42 There is, however, one positive feature of the GPS spoof. It is the ultimate weapon against a GPS dot invasion. Imagine, for example, that you are being watched. Well, you can fool the stalker by pretending you're on work when in fact you have gone on holiday. Or, if you're Carol, you could drive your ex to some empty parking lot where the police will be waiting.
14: 09 So I'm thrilled by this conflict, an impending conflict between privacy on the one hand and the need for a clean spectrum on the other. We just can not tolerate GPS interceptors and forgeries, however, given the lack of effective legal means to protect our privacy from the GPS bullet, can you really blame someone because they want to activate them because they want to use them?
14: 37 I have hopes that we will be able to reconcile this conflict with some kind of technology that has not yet been invented. But in the meantime, take your hand popcorn, because the thing will soon become interesting.
14: 53 Over the next few years, many of you will be proud of holding a GPS dot. You may have many in your possession. You will never lose your belongings again. The GPS dot will radically reorganize your life. But will you be able to withstand the temptation to watch your fellow man? Or will you be able to withstand the temptation to activate a GPS forgery or a Wave Bubble to protect your privacy?
15: 22 So, as usual, what we see on the horizon is full of promises and risk. It will be exciting to see how the events will evolve.
15: 33 Thank you. (Clap)
