U.S. Military Turned GPS into a Global "Numbers Station"
Key takeaways
- That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.
- “I think the evidence that it's for key transmission—for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals—is pretty strong now,” Murdoch said in a call with 404 Media.
- In his new article, Murdoch described how this “forgotten 176-bit slot in the world’s most successful navigation signal turned out to be its quietest and most consequential broadcast.”
The U.S. military has likely been quietly broadcasting codes for its global encryption network using public GPS for nearly 20 years, turning each satellite into a hidden “numbers station,” according to Steven Murdoch, an information security expert, who detailed his findings in a new article in Inside GNSS.
That means every device that uses GPS has been receiving hidden government information for years, and nobody outside the military knew it until now.
Murdoch, a professor of security engineering and head of the Information Security Research Group at University College London, presented evidence that a 176-bit GPS sequence labelled “Subframe 4, Page 17” is encrypted material from the Pentagon’s Over-the-Air Distribution (OTAD) network, which delivers cryptographic keys to military personnel around the world.