Galileo code cracked

Their efforts will mean that anyone who has a navigation device that uses pseudo random number (PRN) codes to access Galileo can use the service for free. Or gratis, and at no charge.

Europe's version of the US GPS system was supposed to make investors shed loads of cash by charging a fee for PRN codes. However, because the US and the European system will share some frequencies they hammered out an agreement that the PRN codes would be open source.

The team at Cornell wondered if it could pull the codes off the air, just with an antenna and lots of signal processing and perhaps using a "Zeppelin". The managed to do this and by April had published the codes on the world wide web.

Galileo responded by publishing the Open Source PRN codes in mid-April. Cornell noticed that they weren't the codes currently used by the GIOVE-A satellite and they were labelled as being the intellectual property of Galileo. In otherwords they were trying to make cash out of open source code.

The codes and the methods used to extract them have just been published in the June issue of GPS World. More at Alma Mater te canamus. µ