Jan Ceuleers wrote:
Interesting Light Reading article on the degree to which infrastructure
(in casu wireless networks) is dependent on GPS timing signals, how
little is needed to jam GPS (intentionally or otherwise), and what the
impact of such jamming would be.
It also talks about how PTP might or might not mitigate some of these
issues.
http://www.lightreading.com/mobile/mobile-security/were-jamming-gps-weakness-could-sink-wireless/d/d-id/706895
I spent 2.5 years as the architect of a national cell phone network
replacement project so I do know a little about this issue:
The core do use GPS to sync up the central time servers, but they also
have Rb local osc, which means that even if you were able to jam the GPS
reception in all the areas that have reference gps receivers, you would
also have to wait long enough so that the Rb clocks would drift apart.
For the GSM/3G/4G networks we have we don't need to know exactly what
the time is (unlike the US CDMA setup which do need single-digit us time
sync), we only need to keep the frequencies the same, and these only
need to match up at the 20 ppm level in order to be able to do seamless
base station handovers at bullet train speeds.
20 ppm is a _lot_ compared to the stability of an Rb osc, it would take
at least some months before things got that bad, and if you had an
adversary who could do wide-area GPS denial over several months, without
getting detected and caught, then you have a _real_ problem.
Terje
--
- <Terje.Mathisen at tmsw.no>
"almost all programming can be viewed as an exercise in caching"
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