GPS Flaw: Security Expert Says He Won't Fly April 6

[Maverick]

That's the day millions of GPS receivers will literally run out of time, rolling over their time counters back to zero, thanks to limitations in timekeeping for older GPS devices. Many navigation systems may be affected, such as on ships or older aircraft, although your smartphone will be fine.

But because GPS satellites are also crucial to digital timekeeping used by websites, electrical grids, financial markets, data centers and computer networks, the effect of April 6 may be even more wide-ranging.

"I'm not going to be flying on April 6," said one information-security expert during a presentation at the RSA 2019 security conference in San Francisco this week.

To be fair, this has happened once before, on Aug. 21, 1999, and planes didn't start crashing then. But today, we're much more dependent on GPS to time everything that happens on Earth down to the last nanosecond.

"The effects would be more widespread [today] because so many more systems have integrated GPS into their operations," said Bill Malik, the Trend Micro vice president who said he wouldn't fly April 6, in a private conversation with Tom's Guide.

https://www.tomsguide.com/us/gps-mini-y2k-rsa2019,news-29583.html

 

[DrHenley]

There is another time rollover problem that is being called the "Epochalypse" because it is a problem with the Linux Epoch. Linux timestamps have a base date of January 1st, 1970. (So the "Linux Epoch" is the period of time beginning January 1st, 1970) The time is a 32 bit signed integer that stores the number of seconds since that date. The maximum value of a 32 bit signed integer is 2,147,483,647. That number of seconds after January 1, 1970 represents 03:14:07 UTC on Tuesday, January 19th, 2038. One second later, the time rolls over to a negative number representing December 13th, 1901.

All 64 bit Linux distributions use a 64 bit signed integer however, and the maximum date on those systems is something like 292 billion years from now. But older Linux distributions, and especially embedded systems will have a huge problem.

 

[Maverick]

And here I thought we were done with this Y2K style bugs. 21st Century and we still worried about dates :-/

 

[Mountain trapper]

Mechanical systems may eventually fail, but electronic systems are guaranteed to get "bugs" at some point. I don't trust anything computer or electronic related.

 

[lonewolf]

[QUOTE="Arcticdude, post: 152105, member: 1046"


I don't trust anything computer or electronic related.[/QUOTE]
no, neither do I, everything will fail eventually.

 

[DrHenley]

As an IT professional, I have less faith in computers than you do! LOL

 

[lonewolf]

I don't trust Planes not with all the recent air crashes and loss of life, " if we had been designed to fly we would have grown wings!"