Critical: Risk of global GPS time synchronization problems on Sunday - Caused by GPS Daemon (GPSD) Rollover Bug
Risk of global GPS time synchronization problems on Sunday - Caused by GPS Daemon (GPSD) Rollover Bug
The US Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency, or CISA, warns of possible GPS problems that could occur from Sunday. A bug in certain versions of gpsd service daemon will cause devices' internal clocks to jump back nearly 20 years.
According to the warning, it concerns devices that run gpsd version 3.20, 3.21 or 3.22. Those versions of the daemon were released between December 31, 2019 and January 8, 2021. Version 3.23 was released on August 6 of this year, leaving a little over a year and a half in which that then latest version of gpsd had the bug. CISA "advises administrators of critical pieces of infrastructure that use GPSD to keep track of time, to verify that they are running GPSD version 3.23 or newer."
GPS software does have a rollover moment, but that happens once every 1024 weeks, or 19.6 years, and that event has already happened in 2019. That's not what this bug is about: the problem lies with a calculation error made in a piece of code written to anticipate a leap second that will occur sometime in the future. If the bug is present in a system, it will occur at sunday and the time on the GPS device will go back to March 2002. If that happens, there is a good chance that a shift will go wrong.
According to the man behind gpsd, it is 'everywhere in mobile embedded systems'. It's in the map service on Android phones. It's also in drones, robotic submarines, and self-driving cars. GPSd is also increasingly being used in recent generations of manned aircraft, naval navigation systems and military vehicles." affected version of gpsd on it, but it is not known on what scale it will go wrong.
Reporting Source: https://brica.de/
Translated from Dutch, Source:
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