Gps spoofing widely disrupts global ship navigation across key sea routes
She Spoofed Sea Ships by the Sea Shore: Measuring Large-Scale GPS Spoofing in Global Maritime Traffic
Cryptography and Security
Summary
GPS signals help ships know exactly where they are, but bad actors can send fake signals to trick many ships at once, causing dangerous confusion. The authors studied data from over 367,000 ships worldwide and found many places where GPS signals were faked repeatedly over months. Some of these faking events happened long before major shipping accidents and regional conflicts became public. This shows GPS spoofing is a real and ongoing problem that affects global maritime safety.
What this means in practice
- •For maritime security teams: Detect ongoing large-scale GPS spoofing in shipping lanes to enhance vessel safety and prevent navigation mishaps.
- •For satellite navigation service providers: Improve GPS signal verification tools by incorporating global spoofing patterns to protect maritime customers from signal tampering.
Authors
Anna Raymaker, Ryan Von Brock, Ryan Pickren, Animesh Chhotaray, Frank Li, Saman Zonouz, Raheem Beyah
Abstract
GPS spoofing has emerged as a serious threat to maritime security, yet its global prevalence, persistence, and structure remain largely unmeasured. In this paper, we present the first large-scale measurement study of maritime GPS spoofing, using global Automatic Identification System (AIS) data, which contain the GPS coordinates broadcasted over time by ships across the world. We focus on large-scale regional spoofing, where external interference displaces many vessels across an area at once, leaving a recognizable signature of physically implausible motion correlated across ships; our motion-aware, marine-specific framework identifies this signature and grades the evidence for GPS spoofing in each region it finds. Applying our approach to AIS data from over 367,000 vessels collected between late November 2024 and early February 2025, we identify 31 persistent anomalous hotspots across high-traffic maritime regions, at least 22 of which show strong evidence of GPS spoofing, with spatial and temporal structure aligning with regional conflict and economic sanctions. Notably, our method found that the spoofing activity in the Red Sea responsible for the highly-publicized grounding of the 75,000-ton container ship, MSC Antonia, was ongoing months before the incident, which has not been previously documented. Similarly, we detected persistent spoofing in the Strait of Hormuz over a year before the 2026 Iran war brought commercial shipping through the Strait to near-standstill. Together, this work establishes GPS spoofing as a widespread, recurring, and measurable threat to global maritime navigation.