A new technique has been designed to prevent cyber attacks on GPS-enabled devices, which remain one of the higher-risk technologies in terms of cyber security.

Researchers from the University of Texas at San Antonio have undertaken a study on how a computer algorithm can mitigate the effects of spoofed GPS attacks on electrical grids and other GPS-reliant technologies. This new algorithm has the potential to help cybersecurity professionals better detect and prevent cyber attacks in real time.

According to one of the lead researchers, Dr Nikolaos Gatsis: “Malicious agents have the ability to disrupt a device’s understanding of time and location by emitting a signal that is pretending to be a GPS signal. This can be very harmful in several different realms of technology.”

The US electrical power grid, for example, depends on GPS to give time stamps for its measurements at stations across the country. Although reliable, researchers in laboratories across the world have shown that the system can be vulnerable to spoofing cyber attacks which can disrupt the system’s time and location data.

Researcher David Akopian explained that malicious cyber attackers can clone the GPS signal and display, for instance, the wrong time or the wrong location, which could cause disruption and downtime by sending people to the wrong location or render hours of data useless.

The new algorithm, which can be applied to cell phones or computers as easily as a new app, has the ability to recognise false GPS signals and counter an attack while it occurs. The main focus has been preventing attacks on the American electrical power grid, but the algorithm is applicable to several different devices.

“As we move forward with this concept of driverless cars it becomes much more vital that we secure our GPS signals, because the hijacking of the location abilities of a driverless car could be very dangerous,” said another researcher Ahmad Taha.

“Beyond that, cellphone towers and banks also use GPS signals. Every day, hundreds of thousands of measurements of time and location are made using this information — and it’s important to make the data secure,” he added.

The trio is now exploring plans to make their algorithm available in app stores for Android and iPhone users, as well as for larger devices like computers.