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Comment by dotancohen | Hacker News Reader

Because it dates to a time when such attacks were infeasible. GPS is very similar in that regard. Even HTTPS was uncommon back when I was in university. NASA spacecraft still communicate over unencrypted channels.

Mindsets were different then.

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not just mindsets, but the computing power available. These days, my smartphone is millions of times more powerful and the computation to do TLS encryption on every website I visit is trivial for a computer that fits in the palm of my hand. Way back when, the 1 or 2 kilobytes or so a modern RSA private key (PEM format) would take up on disk was meaningful when you only had 4 megabytes of RAM and CPUs ran in the megahertz range.

Also to a dumb phone it doesn't matter whether an SMS contains a phishing link because it has no way of accessing it. Until the advent of smart phones SMS phishing was a non-issue.

> GPS is very similar in that regard.

GPS originated as a military protocol and has some level of encryption and authentication, but this is not available to the general public.

GPS *had* no encryption or authentication; indeed, such security is only a recent addition to the L2 frequency.

USK: Galileo also has authentication available on its civilian frequencies.

> such security is only a recent addition to the L2 frequency

Is that already available? I thought GPS L2C didn't include authentication yet.

> GPS had no encryption or authentication; indeed, such security is only a recent addition to the L2 frequency.

This was a long time ago, but I distinctly remember the encrypted P(Y)-code and anti-spoofing being operative in the mid 1990s.

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