Can 176 Weird Bits Break a GPS Receiver?
GPS receivers ingest data from space. That sentence sounds obvious until you start thinking about it like a security engineer. A GPS receiver is a computer with a very strange network interface. Instead of Ethernet or Wi-Fi, its input arrives as an extremely weak radio signal transmitted by satellites roughly 20,000 kilometers overhead. The receiver acquires that signal, demodulates it, reconstructs navigation words, validates parity, maintains state across messages, and feeds the results into firmware responsible for position and time. ...