Russia issues threat to GPS satellites | Hacker News Reader

Russia issues threat to GPS satellites

gpsworld.com

33 pointsscapecast26 comments

> It means that if NATO crosses our red line, it risks losing all 32 of its GPS satellites at once.

Not trying to completely downplay the seriousness of the threat, but Russia has not demonstrated the ability to do anything close to this, at least not yet.

GPS satellites orbit dramatically higher than the satellite Russia destroyed in their test, and they're all in different orbital planes, meaning Russia would have to launch missiles from many locations across the globe, all at once, just to even try this, let alone be successful.

Not to mention that GPS is just one of the GNS systems in orbit.

As a student of more traditional forms of navigation I can't help but have an "I told you so" moment when I read things like this. I've experienced multiple GPS failures in aircraft that necessitated breaking off an approach, as well as active jamming from the ground that interfered with GNC on spacecraft. You simply cannot expect GPS to be invulnerable to attack or to never malfunction. I know this isn't an immediate concern for 99.9% of people--worst case, you have to ask someone for directions and look outside your car instead of using your phone--but for folks with navigation duties at sea, in the air, or in space, or even just someone going out for a long hike, it is imperative to have and be proficient with another system. Fortunately the US military and the engineers who build its systems know this well. I only harp on it because it can sometimes be difficult to get students to truly appreciate the dangers of relying entirely on a single means of navigation.

Satellites will be the first casualties in any major conflict. That's why the US military has placed a renewed emphasis on celestial navigation.

https://www.npr.org/2016/02/22/467210492/u-s-navy-brings-bac...

one of the largest threats from GPS getting taken out is that banks, stock exchanges[0], and even ATMs rely on GPS for timing signals. If GPS is taken out, these could stop working dealing immediate damage to the economy.

[0]https://qz.com/1106064/the-entire-global-financial-system-de...

What a load of absolute garbage.

Banking has some of the slowest to migrate MAINFRAME workloads. These keep track of things in order, atomic transactions, synchronous writes to HA solutions.

"When you pull cash from an ATM or swipe your card at the coffee shop, the machine needs to determine the precise time that the transaction occurs to, for example, prevent it from being over-drawn."

Absolutely and completely false. You do the withdrawal inside an atomic transaction on deposit balance. This is 101 type stuff - how is this garbage getting to HN?

> how is this garbage getting to HN?

huh? what do you mean? I'm pretty sure comments can say w/e nonsense the user wants ... as long as it doesn't break rules.

Clickbait articles with clearly ridiculous assertions (without GPS the bank won't know if you overdrew your account).

I’m not sure why you are being so hostile, but the GP is quite correct.

Clock sync error is one of the most common reasons why credit card terminals fail to process a transaction.

GPS is one of the most common ways to set up a clock, and whilst the terminals and ATMs usually don’t get GPS time directly but through an NTP server the NTP servers do set their time via GPS.

Even if you have an atomic clock it’s usually set via GPS first.

GPS time is why you can actually get a coax to an external GPS antenna in most datacenters today.

After banks and stock exchange another victim of the clockpocalypse would be the Internet at large since whilst TLS itself doesn’t require time synchronization other dependencies such as certificate validation do.

Most modern computers are really really bad at keeping exact time without synchronization, it wouldn’t take much to knock them all out of sync and if GPS goes down it would be really really bad…

Oh and if that isn’t enough then modern cellular networks are also extremely dependent on GPS for both keeping time tolerances in check and for many other reasons.

If Russia knocks out GPS or there is a global GPS outage it will wreck the global economy in a manner that I don’t think most people can even comprehend.

You cannot overdraw your account because your computers clock is wrong.

You cannot overdraw your account because there is an issue with a credit card terminal around clock sync.

This simply cannot happen.

If it can, let me suggest that whoever is writing the account debit code wrap the balance check and debit in a transaction.

You can easily stick a rackmount atomic clock in your data center.

NTP can source from a variety of sources. There are digital RADIO time signals.

On a given exchange, again, you can still trade stocks. Folks forget that there used to be open outcry trading. Even without that an order book can be operated successfully without GPS.

Credit card terminals do not require clock sync with GPS links, they do not have GPS antennas in most cases. If they need precise time, they can timestamp when going through authorization steps to approve the transaction.

It's weird, as someone I guess older, the new generation seems to build such fragile system and think only such ultra complex systems are usable. Yes, things like Google's Spanner are cool. Yes, performance would degrade without GPS (maybe - I can think of some work arounds). But not everyone needs globally distributed consistent databases. You'd be surprised at how much of banking, stock exchange work does NOT depend on anything like these tools.

I wish the HN comments would focus on the many pretty obvious options one could deploy if GPS went away if you even believed that the current system means your bank account will be overdrawn because of a lack of GPS.

No one said you can overdraw your account but the terminal would simply refuse to connect or the transaction would be rejected by the server due to clock sync issues. Also no one said that the terminals get a GPS signal either but if the clock is off on them vs the server they will fail, I have worked on a lot of payment systems.

Rackmount atomic clocks still need a GPS signal today to be set or they have to be pre-set in a central location and then distributed.

Time syncing used to be a PITA and now it’s easy due to GPS so pretty much every protocol has a very narrow time tolerance. My work HP laptop drifts 3-5 min over the weekend of the VPN because it’s not set to an external time server and all hell breaks loose.

Yes civilization will not end over night but it would have a major impact we will find ways to get by but there will be havoc and the financial damages will be in the trillions heck the disruption to shipping and logistics alone would be immense nearly every one and every thing today is reliant on GPS either directly or indirectly.

> No one said you can overdraw your account

False: The qz article I'm responding to says this.

"When you pull cash from an ATM or swipe your card at the coffee shop, the machine needs to determine the precise time that the transaction occurs to, for example, prevent it from being over-drawn."

Please please explain how this "over-drawn" situation occurs because of a GPS satellite.

> but if the clock is off on them vs the server they will fail, I have worked on a lot of payment systems.

False, CC terminal clocks do not need to be GPS time accurate. When the terminal connects to authenticate, they can update their time. There can be issues with authentication if clock skew is bad, but this requires normal levels of time sync (ie, NTP without GPS will be fine).

While the reason is not necessarily correct (although it’s more of an over simplification than an outright error) the terminal needs to have the correct time if not the transaction would not be processed for a myriad of reasons.

The issue is that in the vast chain of networks that a single transaction flows through you have multiple NTP servers each of them taking their own time form a different source which is often backed by GPS.

If GPS services are disrupted globally this would cause payment networks to break down.

Yes there would be a way to recover from it and move away from GPS but you are still missing the point on day-0 of a GPS blackout the global financial system would go down and it would be a mess and it wouldn’t be a mess that is easily sorted…

I don’t think this is true. Every bank and exchange has a business continuity plan to allow processes to be completed manually during an outage and I’ve never seen a BCP that required any sort of GPS or celestial navigation access in order to correctly time stamp a transaction.

Think about how credit cards used to be “swiped”[1] it was a literal carbon copy of the card. These machines are still distributed and occasionally still used when a network is down. The exact time of the transaction isn’t necessary because the cardholder or account agreement contains language to address overdrafts in these situations.

[1]https://www.mobiletransaction.org/how-to-accept-credit-card-...

The Bank has a record of your balance, regardless of GPS. For all live network authenticated reductions of this balance, GPS time is not relevant, the bank still has access to the balance, can still decrease it, can still report an overdraft.

There are many other sources of accurate and precise time information. There are multiple public and private institutions that operate NTP servers attached to atomic clocks. If you need a source that doesn't depend on the internet, you can use the NIST broadcasts. And if you really want to go nuts, don't want to rely on the internet or radio, and can't afford your own cesium clock, you can get a chronometer with a temperature-stabilized oscillator and a known drift.

>you can use the NIST broadcasts.

Which recently had their funding threatened, AND aren't reliably available across the entire US anyway.

A cesium clock does no good if it isn't synched to the rest of the world.

The entire point of a cesium clock is that it does NOT need to remain linked all the time. That is literally why you would get one in your rack.

So your statement is totally false. In fact, the BENEFIT of a cesium clock is the incredible stability in the absence of a sync.

Cesium tubes have a 5-7 year service life. They need to be synced up to the rest of the world, or they can't tell you the time. They do drift, a bit. If you're trying to keep clock in sync to the second, they'll do as long as the tube lasts, but if you're trying to keep systems in sync to the microsecond, they need to be synced up from time to time. The stability of an HP5061a Cesium Beam clock is about 10^-11

If you want to stay within a microsecond, you have to sync it up about every 3 months. This could be done with a mobile atomic clock driven to sync up secondary standards, in the absence of GPS.

If you need it you can do something around -12+.

Is this needed for the clock drift in the CC hand terminal that creates these "clock sync" errors that make it so the bank can't figure out my balance / avoid an overdraft?

There is digital radio time code, there is the internet and NTP where you can pull directly from the atomic clock standard, there is GPS. You can get your own atomic clock and get by for a while even IF you need some kind of perfect sync so the credit card reader doesn't have a "clock sync" error.

The claim here is apparently that relatively insane levels of percision are needed so that normal database transactions remain atomic. That I can withdraw cash from an ATM. That I can use my credit card.

I remain skeptical. Withdrawing from an ATM depends on ONE system knowing what your balance is. Your banks. While it might be nice to be accurate to the microsecond, it's not a requirement. To the second is going to be fine. Similarly, when you swipe a credit card, the auth process does a live inquiry (balance, fraud control etc). Again, I'm extremely skeptical of the claims here that we need microsecond SYNCED time for any of this.

The thing is, once something becomes commonplace, people build in obligations against it without thinking about it. All those layers that civilization depends upon have a cost, and as long as the cost is paid, all is good.

We're talking about the sudden loss of precision timekeeping, which could desync all sorts of things in unexpected ways. It's my understanding that precision time is required to make even the cell phone networks properly operate, and they'd fall apart without it.

If Russia were to take out GPS, the effects would be deep and expensive to correct, if we could. There's a very small, but non-zero chance it could collapse our supply chains. As time goes on, this chance grows, unless there is an active effort to keep backup systems viable. We all know how actively the US maintains infrastructure 8(

The claim was about ATM withdrawals and credit card swipes. Ie, without a GPS clock there would be a "clock sync" error in the ATM machine, and no cash could be drawn.

I continue to remain EXTREMELY skeptical of this claim. It makes almost no sense.

Please note that GPS is not the source of time, NIST is, and you can get NIST time in a variety of ways including over the internet if needed. And as I have been describing, many of these described errors are around systems with one source of truth (ie, not google spanner type globally distributed databases). So they make even less sense.

Note I'm familiar with clock skew issues and errors in authentication and other systems. These issues show up when errors are in minutes and seconds not microseconds.

Exactly.

You don't need a GPS atomic clock, you can actually buy a rackmount one.

If that doesn't work you can use the internet to connect to NIST.

NIST is actually where GPS get's it's time, so you can just connect, using the internet, there directly.

There are systems that can do a fallback to a digital radio timecode. These are extreme cases that DO NOT apply to just an ATM cash draw.

> “Russia has demonstrated a deliberate disregard for the security, safety, stability and long-term sustainability of the space domain for all nations,” Gen. James Dickinson, commander of U.S. Space Command, said.

It's funny that a general and commander of a military organisation, from a country that started the militarisation of space, is saying this with a straight face.

I love watching how the US tries to shape American public perception - one of the interesting things that I noticed when the US decided to create a military arm for outer space was how suddenly, US media was flooded with news from government sources on how the US military has had many unexplained "encounters" with UFO (with the media even hinting to their possible extra-terrestrial origins). a PR exercise this was quite interesting to see as it was a U-turn after denying for decades that UFOs are extra-terrestrial. Looks like they now want some of the gullible public to believe that militarisation of space is a step to protect them from future "alien" threats. (After all, any sane people will question the need for spending more money on a currently useless arm of the military.)

Site seems to be experiencing difficulties.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211130032002/https://www.gpswo...

This is presumably Russia’s response to NATO threats of retaliation if they invade Ukraine.

There are all kinds of scaruthings going on between the US and Russia right now.

https://uncensorednews.us/russia and https://uncensorednews.us/ukraine

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