Image: HYPNOSIS system – screen grab from IAI video posted on social media
What’s new: An Israeli jammer and spoofer combo designed as a non-kinetic anti-drone measure.
Why it’s important: As these kinds of systems proliferate GNSS services become less reliable. And the chance of disrupting legitimate safety of life operations increases.
What else to know:
- The U.S. DOT defines GPS as a “safety of life” system. When supplemented by EGNOS, the EU does as well.
- Jamming other frequencies and spoofing L1, to the best of our knowledge, was first deployed by the Russians in 2015/16 as a counter drone measure to protect VIPs.
- Ukraine has developed and deployed Lima which seems to do the same kind of thing.
- Spoofing all GNSS at the same time seems relatively uncomplicated and inexpensive. See this report from 2018.
Israeli firm unveils non-kinetic system to stop drone swarms
Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) introduced HYPNOSIS, a navigation warfare system built to counter large numbers of drones and other satellite-guided aerial threats by scrambling the navigation signals those weapons depend on to find their targets, rather than physically shooting them down.
Most modern drones, including the cheap, mass-produced one-way attack drones that have become a defining weapon of recent conflicts, rely on Global Navigation Satellite Systems, commonly known as GNSS, the broader category that includes America’s GPS along with other countries’ satellite navigation networks, to determine their exact position and timing as they fly toward a target. HYPNOSIS attacks that dependency directly using two related but distinct techniques. Jamming works by overpowering the legitimate satellite signal with a stronger radio transmission on the same frequency, effectively drowning out the real navigation data a drone needs to receive. Spoofing goes a step further, broadcasting fake navigation signals that trick a drone’s receiver into calculating an incorrect position or heading entirely, sending the weapon off course without the drone ever realizing its guidance has been compromised.
