On April 6, 2019, the time counters on dated GPS receivers across the globe will run out, starting back at zero, Tom’s Guide reported. Any GPS systems that have not been updated will be affected, including old flight-management systems and GPS satellites that are responsible for keeping time on electrical grids, websites, computer networks, and financial markets.
At the RSA 2019 security conference in San Francisco earlier this week, information-security expert and Trend Micro vice president, Bill Malik, said he would not fly on April 6.
GPS has experienced a time reset once before without major issues, but Malik said, “the effects would be more widespread today because so many more systems have integrated GPS into their operations.” Malik listed examples such as containers being loaded and unloaded at ports automatically with the use of GPS guided cranes, GPS reliant public-safety systems, and traffic-monitoring systems for bridges.
He said, “Twenty years ago these links were primitive. Now they are embedded. So any impact will be substantially greater.” According to FalTech GPS, a British company that manufactures GPS signal repeaters, some GPS receivers “may not be able to cope,” and cellular communications networks may also be affected.
In April 2018, the Department of Homeland Security and the European Union Aviation Safety Agency issued a notice urging “federal, state, local, and private sector organizations” to update the firmware of their GPS devices before April 6.
According to Tom’s Guide, the U.S. Naval Observatory issued a presentation online stating, “navigation solution should be OK, but associated time tags could be incorrect thus still corrupting navigation data at the system level.”
In the presentation, the USNO also said the issue is not exclusive to April 6/7 2019, because “a common fix for week-number ambiguity was to hard-code a new pivot date, which shifts the April 6 rollover event to an unknown date-time in the future.” To avoid this reoccurring, GPS devices manufactured within the last decade use 13 bits for the week counter, totaling 157 years (2137) before the devices must restart time.
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March 12, 2019
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