Increasingly, cyber-criminals are trying to divert airplanes with false GPS signals or by hijacking drones via GPS. The Swiss Federal Office for Armaments (Armasuisse) now wants to protect against such attacks by crowdsourcing information, reported CEToday.

Armasuisse wants to use crowdsourcing to protect aircraft, helicopters and drones from cyber-attacks. Currently a prototype of the system called Crowd-GPS-Sec constantly monitors the airspace and uses digital air traffic signals from aircraft and drones. False GPS signals can be recognised within a few seconds. The attacker is located within fifteen minutes. The signals are monitored by a group of volunteers via the internet. This would allow affected organisations to benefit without building their own surveillance infrastructure.

Crowd-GPS-Sec was developed by Armasuisse and researchers from the ETH Zurich, the Technical University of Kaiserslautern, the Ruhr University Bochum and the New York University Abu Dhabi.