American GPS satellites have been transmitting secret encrypted messages for nearly 20 years
For the past two decades, American GPS navigation satellites have been secretly transmitting encrypted messages on top of the standard civilian signal.
The discovery was made by Stephen Murdoch, a professor and cybersecurity researcher at University College London.
The researcher discovered a hidden data fragment that the U.S. military had reserved back in the early 2000s.
The researcher published the results of his work, noting that this secret transmission element operates under a very vague official description. The U.S. military command has classified this segment as “special content at the discretion of the command.”
To date, no government or military agency has publicly explained exactly what information is transmitted via this channel.
To unravel this mystery, a team of scientists conducted a large-scale analysis of a massive array of satellite data.
After analyzing 12 million messages over 19 years, the researchers determined that the content of this segment is encrypted and statistically indistinguishable from random noise.
According to experts, this is exactly what high-level professional cryptographic encryption looks like.
By all indications, the discovered hidden communication channel resembles the specific operation of a so-called “numeric station.”
This is a one-way encrypted stream of information that anyone with the necessary equipment can receive, but it is impossible to track who exactly is listening to it or decipher it without prior context.
Such technologies allow for the transmission of secret data to any point on the planet with minimal risk.
Historically, as experts note, it was precisely such stations that were actively used by intelligence agencies to communicate with agents abroad. The main advantage of this scheme lies in its absolute security and the simplicity of passively receiving information.
This was reported by Stephen Murdoch in X.
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