A top-secret spoofer [Back Story]
IEEE Spectrum · 2016
When Todd E. Humphreys first dreamt of building a GPS spoofer from scratch, he also had to imagine someday justifying the project's seemingly subversive rationale. Humphreys had been working on software radio technology as a postdoc in Cornell University's GPS group, led by engineering professors Mark L. Psiaki and Paul Kintner. During a meeting, he piped up with a new idea: He wanted to hack together a GPS spoofer that could dupe a receiver into registering that it was in a location different from where it actually was. A long pause followed his pitch. Psiaki worried about the legal risk. Humphreys intended to use the spoofer only for research, but jamming GPS signals is illegal. And what if its software was somehow implicated in a crime? "A spoofer is a dangerous thing in the wrong hands," Psiaki notes.