FRESH

Hacker News

Home

The Quiet Numbers Station: Decoding Nineteen Years of GPS Cryptography

126 points by lordgilman

by ck2

4 subcomments

People are complaining about a clickbaity title but it's a fascinating article I am not sure most would read otherwise
What's interesting to me is how out of date US GPS system is compared to China's BeiDou
and while most US GPS receivers will use Russia's GLONOSS, China's BeiDou is blocked
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47849174

by somat

1 subcomments

An interesting lesser known role of GPS is that it is part of the US nuclear monitoring network and it's L3 signal is part of this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DjLnIb41DuQ I Found The US Nuclear Detection System In Space (saveitforparts)

by NelsonMinar

1 subcomments

Summary from the study author: https://www.benthamsgaze.org/2026/06/02/the-quiet-numbers-st...
PDF of article (page 62) https://cdn.coverstand.com/61061/865273/2c88ea662e2b57478723...

by zuzululu

0 subcomment

I know it isn't really a number station but I wanted it to be true...
Someone broadcasting one time pad messages using GPS over years...
a spy operative using jogging app changing routes slightly
or maybe a cartel member embedded inside highly hostile countries like Singapore

by masfuerte

2 subcomments

> To make processing this massive dataset practical, we built a Julia pipeline to extract the bits directly into a DuckDB database.
The raw data is a bit more than 1GB per annum.
The data of interest is 176 bits every 12.5 minutes for 19 years. That is, about 17MB of data. Possibly multiplied by the number of satellites, roughly thirty.
It's not big data.

by zerobees

6 subcomments

"Numbers station" is a weird analogy, because the idea of a numbers station was to broadcast messages to undercover operatives in a way that can be received using unmodified (and therefore non-suspicious) household radio receivers.
Here, it appears to be a rekeying system for specialized military gear.

by buredoranna

1 subcomments

Since we're talking numbers stations...
I'll take this opportunity to plug the CONET project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Conet_Project
https://archive.org/details/The-Conet-Project
[edit: formatting]

by 7777777phil

2 subcomments

Slightly related the latest Veritasium Video: Something is jamming GPS over Europe.
https://youtu.be/tz23G_UXCGA

by timeinput

5 subcomments

This is an interesting article. It has a very strong AI accent.
I really wish I could tell how real it is. When some part of it I can tell is AI slop, how much of it is AI slop? Inside GNSS has always been a marketing rag with sometimes some interesting articles.
The author is a security researcher, so maybe poking at GPS bits makes sense, but talking about floating point bit depth? There's too much slop for me to figure out if there's anything of real interest or if this is just a hallucination.
Edit. After reading more carefully this is 100% AI slop. Inside GNSS published Steven Murdoch's chat gpt session. Maybe some data was transmitted? The only way you'll actually know is to redo the research your self. There are many fabrications / confabulations that clearly happen with AI in the text.

by anigbrowl

2 subcomments

The story links to the current issue of the Inside GNSS magazine but the article isn't available in the digital edition, apparently. It's in the print edition, readable at https://lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=...
The source data and analytical code (in Julia) is also available at https://lsc-pagepro.mydigitalpublication.com/publication/?i=...
In my view people nitpicking the 404 media story are being ridiculous. Everyone in their audience knows GPS originated as a military system, indeed I think most of teh general public knows that. Bashing them for not mentioning this is just looking for something to be mad about.

by eagerpace

2 subcomments

GPS was always a dual use system. This is very detailed and specific, but not interesting or surprising. Research has been study GPS signal data, found parts that are encrypted and he doesn’t understand. The end. Article seems only intended to generate an emotional response of “how dare they use GPS for war, man!”

by opengrass

0 subcomment

Messages would be split over multiple mediums or be slow.

by transistor-man

1 subcomments

This is a fantastic writeup

by jp42

0 subcomment

Meanwhile Starlink and Starshield: Hold my beer ;-)

by rafram

5 subcomments

Clickbait from 404 Media? Surely not!
The part they kept out of the headline:
> for use in distributing the keys for accessing the military GPS signals
It’s common knowledge that the military has access to a separate, encrypted, higher-precision GPS signal. “Numbers station” implies that they’re distributing unrelated encrypted information, but they’re not; it’s not surprising that GPS signals would be used to deliver information related to GPS, even if only military receivers have any use for it!

by skeledrew

0 subcomment

> [in a new article in Inside GNSS](https://insidegnss.com/current-issue/?ref=404media.co)
These people need to mind their links. Unless that "current-issue" is the only/last one.

by moritzwarhier

1 subcomments

Later submission:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48414479
https://www.404media.co/the-u-s-military-quietly-turned-gps-...
The 404 article seems fluff-free and cites
https://insidegnss.com/current-issue/
as source.

by josefritzishere

1 subcomments

best zero day exploit ever