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What’s in a Boarding Pass Barcode?
- myth_buster 11y agoInterested in learning what’s in your boarding pass barcode? Take a picture of the barcode with your phone, and upload it to this site. Woah! We are talking about private information being easily accessed from our boarding passes and there is a passage on uploading it to some site online. Wouldn't that be ill-advised.
- michaelmior 11y agoI was just about to say the same thing. I'm surprised at this coming from Krebs.
- ellisv 11y agoI basically read this as "Worried someone has your credit card information? Enter your credit card number to find out!"
- rmc 11y agoSomeone has sorta done that http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/ http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/ (Try to submit bogus data to see the results :) )
- on_ 11y agoKrebs has some pretty awesome stuff, but i came here to say this as well. inlitedataresearch.com doesn't seem like the place to do this and while he probably assumes you understand the risks/used a google image instead, it did not flow well.
- peter303 11y agoThats like googling your social security number to see if any website is using it. I've done this with range-search however.
- callesgg 11y agoTried it, it was also a isbn number of some book :)
- eagle1 11y agoThat's a little irresponsible on the part of airlines.
- emersonrsantos 11y agoThis barcode is normally used as input to ACP (IBM Airline Control Program, also called TPF or z/TPF) in plaintext to a TCP/IP TN3270-based terminal emulator running under Windows (with or without any SSH encryption). But the barcode text is visible to anyone facing the terminal. At least it's how it happened in all my latest flights.
- mschuster91 11y ago> IBM Airline Control Program, or ACP, was an operating system developed by IBM beginning about 1965. > TPF evolved from the Airlines Control Program (ACP), a free package developed in the mid-1960s by IBM in association with major North American and European airlines. In 1979, IBM introduced TPF as a replacement for ACP — and as a priced software product. Holy fuck. I don't want to be the poor guy maintaining code that is likely to be older than himself...
- badloginagain 11y agoThe job security + paycheck might be justified though. Almost guaranteed small team too.
- vxNsr 11y agoYeah, I know someone who had a consulting job for some obscure IBM mainframe "thing" and she basically got to do whatever she wanted with an amazing salary because she was one of 3 people in the world who knew anything about it.
- yitchelle 11y agoThat is really "niche", but I wonder how transferable her skills are? in case those IBM mainframes becomes obsolete :-)
- BillinghamJ 11y agoThey're already very obsolete. Doesn't mean the support contracts will go away though!
- pcl 11y agoIt's worth noting that everything mentioned in the article except the full frequent flyer number is also printed in ASCII on the boarding pass.
- carterehsmith 11y agoSure, but the frequent flyer number is apparently not well protected: "Not only could I see this one flight, but I could see ANY future flights that were booked to his frequent flyer number from the Star Alliance.”"
- monochromatic 11y agoThe frequent flyer number seems to be the piece that gives away the keys to the kingdom.
- ajdlinux 11y agoEven if the FF number were not printed on the boarding pass, the booking reference/PNR and surname are generally enough to log in and retrieve the FF number from the booking.
- ubernostrum 11y agoDepends on the airline. US-based airlines tend to require an actual password to access the account and see future flights, spend miles on redemptions, and so on (I have accounts, currently, with four different US-based carriers, and all of them require a password for account access). The confirmation code and passenger name are enough to make changes to that reservation, though; if you know someone's code + name you can cancel the return segment of their journey, for example. I'm wondering if the person being quoted was confused by seeing the return segments of a multi-segment trip (which are part of a single reservation, and would come up with just the information on the boarding pass), and thought it was actually full account access.
- CaptainZapp 11y agoI'm wondering if the person being quoted was confused by seeing the return segments of a multi-segment trip I wondered that too. I'm a Miles & More member via Swiss (which is part of the Lufthansa group) and you definitely need a password / pin to access your FF account. Accessing a specific booking via booking code / surname is a whole different issue.
- jjulius 11y agoThis just reinforced why I use smartphone boarding passes.
- skeoh 11y agoFrom my own testing on the matter I have found that digital boarding passes just encode the same data in a different barcode format.
- ubernostrum 11y agoI think the concern here is what happens if someone finds your paper boarding pass and scans it. That's less likely to happen with a boarding pass on your phone. (though in general, the problem of airlines requiring very little information -- all of which is on the boarding pass -- to be able to access an itinerary and make changes or cancel it is somewhat well-known among frequent flyers)
- skeoh 11y agoFair enough, that makes sense. Thanks for the clarification.
- kawsper 11y agoIs this the reason why you need to scan your boarding-card if you buy something in the airport? Is it regulation or are these companies data-mining? Edit: Apparently it has something to do with VAT: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11794109/The-real-reason-airport-shops-want-to-see-your-boarding-pass.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/travelnews/11794109/The-re...
- scintill76 11y agoIt's probably not VAT-specific and not necessarily done for the advantage of the retailers. At least, I understand the concept of duty-free stores to be that the retailer doesn't have to collect tax, so they can make the customer's overall price lower, and the customer can dodge import tax by either consuming in the airport or being below tax-free value thresholds. On the other hand, in this article one retailer claims it's a "practical impossibility" to have duty-free prices, so maybe they're all gaming the customer. And even if they have a tax reason to collect boarding passes, I wonder if they are prohibited from doing their own analytics on it. Apparently merchants can with credit card numbers: https://www.quora.com/Can-businesses-use-credit-card-data-for-customer-analytics https://www.quora.com/Can-businesses-use-credit-card-data-fo...
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- ajdlinux 11y agoSince the article doesn't actually say - the barcode is PDF417.
- mynegation 11y agoThe barcode is PDF417 and there are phone apps that scan and convert it to text (http://www.pdf417.mobi/ http://www.pdf417.mobi/) - in case you do not want to send this to some website. I played with it, decoding my own boarding passes, but did not find anything that was not already printed on the pass. Granted there was a lot of abbreviated gibberish which may have been something sensitive.
- skewart 11y agoHow exactly is using a random app any safer than using a random website? Or, what other benefit could it have? Both an app and a website are somebody else's code running on your local machine and (often) communicating with a remote server. A random app could just as easily grab your info from the barcode.
- leoedin 11y agoUsing an app can be safer than a website. 1. If the app doesn't have permissions to use the internet (possibly Android only, although the Android 6 discussion seems to suggest that there's ways round this). 2. If you use the app while disconnected from the internet and ensure that it isn't running when you reconnect. Neither of those is possible when you upload the image to be parsed online.
- skewart 11y agoThose are both hypothetical that are very far from typical ways that people use apps on their phones. An app might upload the image to a remote server. A website might parse it locally through JS - maybe disabling your connection, submitting your image, parsing it, then wiping your cached website data would be just as "safe". The problem is the knee-jerk reaction that "some random website" is dangerous while some random app is not. You have to assume both are equally risky in this situation.
- kristopolous 11y agoSo upon the actual boarding process, is the actual flight reservation checked with the name or is it susceptible to fraud? I can see how fraud can be prevented with this schema, but I wonder if it's implemented.
- carlob 11y agoI had tried that before using Mathematica instead of a website and I was also surprised to see the data in the barcode is not really signed in any way. IIRC it was a European low cost like Ryan air, and I thought it was scary that I could have generated the same exact bar code just by knowing my name and the flight. Of course there is an extra step of validation, because the airline has the passenger list, so you can't just add yourself to a flight.
- scrollaway 11y agoCynical me wonders if it's like this on purpose for the benefit of law enforcement. But then again, Hanlon's razor...
- icebraining 11y agoIn what way would it benefit them?
- carlob 11y agoI think the only purpose that code bar serves is so that the person at the gate doesn't have to strike a line on a printed list.
- thomasjoulin 11y agoThe boarding pass format spec linked in the article [1] shows the support for signing (page 49, fields 25 onwards) The boarding pass data is still plaintext as explained, but a signature is appended to validate that the content has not been tempered with, and who generated it. I think boarding pass signing is mandatory on all U.S. airlines at least but I have no source for that [1] http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/stb/documents/bcbp_implementation_guidev4_jun2009.pdf http://www.iata.org/whatwedo/stb/documents/bcbp_implementati...