Gary E. Miller on the GPSD Bug

Gary E. Miller, principal maintainer of GPSD, joins the Aperture Podcast to discuss a bug in this service that potentially could have caused some disruptions on devices that rely on global positioning systems for precise time-keeping. GPSD is a service daemon that extracts time information from GPS appliances. GPSD can be found in anything from mobile phones, to submarine navigation systems, and satellites. There are also industrial applications that reply on GPS for timing, including flow meters in pipelines, for example. A bug was discovered earlier this year in the GPSD code that could have rolled back time on GPS-reliant devices starting Oct. 24 to March 2002. Such an event could have affected data integrity with systems dependent on timestamps, for example. Some sensors transmit data regularly and are part of larger systems that take actions based on sensor readings. Miller explains how GPSD works, the intricacies of the bug, and why there haven't been  incidents related to the bug since Oct. 24.