Cybersecurity Policy Report, China Seen Gaining Advantage in Critical PNT Systems, (Nov 4, 2024)
Reliance on overseas global navigation satellite systems (GNSSs) by U.S. critical infrastructure poses a vulnerability that the FCC needs to understand, Commissioner Nathan Simington said today.
Many systems in the U.S. rely on overseas GNSSs, such as China’s BeiDou, for PNT (positioning, navigation, and timing) functions, and their operators might not even know it, Commissioner Simington noted at an event hosted by the Hudson Institute.
Reliance on BeiDou, which has become more resilient than the U.S. Global Positioning System (GPS), presents a national security risk if the Chinese government decides to block BeiDou signals to the U.S., he said.
GPS vulnerabilities and the comparative strength of BeiDou is “becoming one of America’s biggest security issues,” Commissioner Simington warned. A related issue is the installation of Chinese-made components in cellphone handsets sold in the U.S. to enable those handsets to use BeiDou, he said, because those components could be used by the Chinese government to exfiltrate data.
He said the FCC’s Enforcement Bureau last year began investigating the prevalence of Chinese-made cellular components in handsets used in the U.S. after leaders of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party expressed concern (CPR, Sept. 13, 2023).
He said he couldn’t comment on the progress of the Enforcement Bureau’s probe but said he hoped the investigation would help the FCC “better understand how GPS and other GNSS is used in the United States.”
“The FCC needs to better understand whether, when, and how terrestrial handsets might currently connect to foreign satellites for the provision of unregulated data services,” Commissioner Simington said, citing fitness tracking apps as an unregulated data service that might use both GPS and BeiDou.
“The FCC has little insight into whether and how terrestrial handsets may connect to foreign satellites for the provision of data services that fall outside the FCC’s jurisdiction,” he said.
An additional concern for Commissioner Simington is that the FCC is not among the federal agencies in the “loop” for notification about GPS outages. “The FCC has got to use its powers to protect civilian airwave integrity, and right now when it comes to GPS not only are we not really doing that, we’re not in the loop,” he said.
Other speakers at the Hudson Institute event explained how GPS had deteriorated and fallen behind BeiDou and the European Union’s Galileo GNSS system, a concern that Commissioner Simington said he shared.
Mark Montgomery, senior director at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies’ Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation, said the Department of Defense had “sucked for 20 years” at identifying and planning for a GNSS environment that has become increasingly contested globally.
Critical civilian infrastructure on which the U.S. military depends, such as seaports, would be unable to function if GPS signals were jammed, Mr. Montgomery said.
GPS is a fragile system because its signals are “very, very, very weak,” said Dana Goward, president of the Resilient Navigation Foundation. “In fact, the stars twinkling and the sun sparkling make more radiant noise than a GPS satellite does. That means that any sort of radiofrequency noise on that frequency or in that spectrum can deny or prevent receivers from receiving GPS signals.”
Robert McDowell, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former FCC Commissioner, blamed Congress for failing to push DoD and its contractors to upgrade GPS by launching satellites that use spectrum in the L5 band, which is less congested and allows for stronger signals.
GPS uses the more congested L1 band, while China has upgraded BeiDou with L5-enabled satellites, Mr. McDowell said. Congress gave DoD funding to launch 21 L5 satellites, but only 17 were launched and the command-and-control system for the constellation hasn’t been developed, he noted.
“There seems to be no oversight of any of this in Congress, and this is a very frustrating matter,” he said. “We are now way behind—a decade, maybe 15 years behind Europe and China vis-à-vis the next-gen GPS.”
Every U.S. critical infrastructure sector depends on GPS for positioning, navigation, or timing, and the existing GPS can be jammed or spoofed with devices no larger than a suitcase, he warned.
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