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I feel like this is the kind of thing that would've been completely ignored by everybody except for a handful of concerned hackers had it not been for the recen

I feel like this is the kind of thing that would've been completely ignored by everybody except for a handful of concerned hackers had it not been for the recent media outrage against Boeing (and in my opinion absolutely deserved). I guess the question is how bad is it (from the article it's hard to tell exactly, but it sure doesn't sound great)? And another question is how many of our systems that we rely on, from bridges to airplanes to traffic lights, are just actually very insecure but either nobody notices or nobody exploits them? That said, Boeing's abysmal PR and completely blanket "it's not our fault" statements make me assume the worst here. I have no idea how that company will ever earn back my trust. But maybe they have enough regulatory capture, much like Equifax, that they just don't care.

jquery 7y ago
>I have no idea how that company will ever earn back my trust Millions of ongoing safe flights? I dunno. I feel like they're getting savaged (which they deserve... to a point... but we will cross that point I am pretty sure, if we haven't already...) The thousands (tens of thousands?) of safe flights per day don't make the news. Boeing has been a pioneer in the safest form of transportation in existence. Mentour Pilot (an active 737 pilot on YouTube) goes into detail about why he's not concerned about Boeing (any more than he's concerned about Airbus). I can also share a story from my (late) father who worked at Boeing from 30 years (and was working at Boeing during the MAX crashes). I asked him why Boeing let the 737-MAX debacle happen. These were a dying man's words (paraphrased): "Boeing wanted to ground the plane after the first 737-MAX crash but the FAA refused until after the second crash. Boeing did not have the authority to unilaterally ground the planes." Take that for what it's worth.
- tempguy9999 7y ago
  If that quote is so[x], that casts a very deep shadow over the FAA. They've gone from handing off their responsibility for validation to outright rejecting the safety advice of the maker of the aircraft. [x] and I don't mean that to doubt you but I hope you understand I can't be absolute on this without verification
  - jquery 7y ago
    Keep in mind I don’t know exactly how those conversations went between Boeing and the FAA, nor do I know exactly who my dad was referring to when he said Boeing (the head of engineering? head of safety? A group of people inside Boeing? Was Boeing unified in its opinion or was this concentrated in the area of engineering my father worked in?) Grounding an entire class of plane is not a decision made lightly because of the huge financial and political implications. My takeaway is Boeing leaned towards grounding and the FAA did not and on balance the plane stayed in the air while Boeing worked on the fixes.* *EDIT: This is probably a conversation that happens after every crash/major-incident and hindsight is 20/20.
- mikeash 7y ago
  Boeing probably doesn’t have the ability to ground their fleet with legal force, but if they said, “these planes aren’t safe, don’t fly them until we can investigate and fix,” most airlines would listen and I don’t think the FAA could somehow block this.
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    A statement like that would also be corporate suicide. Imagine the lawsuits.
    - mikeash 7y ago
      Would it really be worse than having a government agency forcibly ground your planes for safety reasons?
      - brokenmachine 7y ago
        IANAL but I think Boeing exposes themselves to less liability with FAA making the decision to ground them to investigate.
  - jquery 7y ago
    I’m not absolving Boeing of responsibility, just adding some color to the conversation.
- blackflame7000 7y ago
  If you look at the Top 7 safest airplanes in terms of accidents per hours flown you get: 1) Airbus A340 - No crashes 2) Boeing 777 - 5 crashes, 2 intentional (Malaysia x2), 1 engine-related (Rolls-Royce problem), 2 pilot-error (Asiana/Dubai) - [Thanks fishywang] 3) Boeing 747-8 4) Boeing 737-NG 5) Boeing 767 6) Airbus A320 7) Boeing 757
  - fishywang 7y ago
    Did you miss the Asiana 777 at SFO? Or is that engine-related?
    - FDSGSG 7y ago
      That one was stupidity-related.
      - jquery 7y ago
        I was always irrationally nervous flying into SFO, worried about precisely what ended up happening. We should all be glad the plane mostly held together through the cartwheel, saving many lives.
        WalterBright 7y ago
        I can confidently assert that no airframe is designed with cartwheeling in mind. Nor hitting trees/buildings/cliffs.
        jquery 7y ago
        True, it's not part of the certification process, but I do know that modern jets airframes are made to be as... um... "flexible"* (? searching for the word here...) as possible in catastrophic situations. An older airframe probably would have disintegrated under the same forces. Luck and good fortune also played a huge role of course. What the pilots did was unconscionably neglectful. CFIT is often (usually?) fatal for all passengers. *EDIT: It's similar to software that's written to be extremely robust that encounters an unexpected error (or set of errors). The software wasn't necessarily designed to handle it, but sometimes it can nonetheless.
thfuran 7y ago
And another question is how many of our systems that we rely on, from bridges to airplanes to traffic lights, are just actually very insecure I'd guess virtually all of them.
- mtgx 7y ago
  Worse yet, many cities want to become "smart" (pushed by iot companies' sales people in part).
- munk-a 7y ago
  How likely do you think it is that a company that manufactures traffic lights and incidentally builds the software to control them would cough up 40+/hr to have someone independent come in and vet the software that was written for 12/hr and seems to work just fine? Part of this is just a poor understanding and pricing for software consultancy - along with some absolutely terrible actors in the HPC realm. Ideally your HPC will come in and spend a fraction of the time vetting software that the dev team built, but occasionally you get a fraud who works 8/5 for a month at 120/hr and delivers nothing but vapor in the end. Maybe some security consultant industry group could set up a certification program, though all the times in memory I've seen software related certification it's been 1. Absolute BS in terms of skills evaluated. 2. A money grab by the certifier.
jdavis703 7y ago
I can tell you traffic lights are extremely insecure. Last month there was a traffic light that was turned the wrong way, such that it was impossible to tell if the light was green. So I climbed the poll and turned it to the right direction. Another fellow pedastrian thanked me. A bad actor could do anything from a DOS (positioning it the wrong direction) to tampering with the bulbs (for example swapping out all the greens with reds). The reason most society doesn't collapse is because we assume most people are good actors. Unfortunately once your device is hooked up to the internet you vastly increase the odds of dealing with bad actors and have to spend more time and money securing against bad actors.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  All the traffic lights here in Australia are honking great big metal poles that you'd need some serious equipment to reposition. Swapping bulbs would be a big operation too. What country are you in that has rotatable traffic lights?
  - johannes1234321 7y ago
    Even if the traffic lights can't be rotsteted it's relatively trivial for an bad actor to break it in some way and hanging up your permanent green light at night and then watch the chaos. As gp said: The amount of such bad actors is low. And gains from an individual hack are low and there's a chance of getting caught.
    - Waterluvian 7y ago
      "Relatively trivial" must be relative. Traffic lights where I am require a cherry picker in the intersection to get at. This is like hacking servers. If you can get all the way to physical access with the device, of course it's exploitable. But that doesn't actually say a lot about how secure something is. I imagine the quality of the lights around the world differ. If you can climb up and adjust it, these aren't the kinds of lights I'm thinking of.
      - 7y ago
TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
>how many of our systems that we rely on, from bridges to traffic lights, are just actually very insecure but either nobody notices or nobody exploits them I write software that is critical for public safety customers (think police/firefighters). Maybe this is just my perspective having left a defense company but it is terribly insecure. The “secure” version of our product was obviously an after thought, it was poorly executed and i dont think it’s even used widely. And my company dominates this market, so the attack surface is huge

jquery 7y ago

>I have no idea how that company will ever earn back my trust Millions of ongoing safe flights? I dunno. I feel like they're getting savaged (which they deserve... to a point... but we will cross that point I am pretty sure, if we haven't already...) The thousands (tens of thousands?) of safe flights per day don't make the news. Boeing has been a pioneer in the safest form of transportation in existence. Mentour Pilot (an active 737 pilot on YouTube) goes into detail about why he's not concerned about Boeing (any more than he's concerned about Airbus). I can also share a story from my (late) father who worked at Boeing from 30 years (and was working at Boeing during the MAX crashes). I asked him why Boeing let the 737-MAX debacle happen. These were a dying man's words (paraphrased): "Boeing wanted to ground the plane after the first 737-MAX crash but the FAA refused until after the second crash. Boeing did not have the authority to unilaterally ground the planes." Take that for what it's worth.

tempguy9999 7y ago
If that quote is so[x], that casts a very deep shadow over the FAA. They've gone from handing off their responsibility for validation to outright rejecting the safety advice of the maker of the aircraft. [x] and I don't mean that to doubt you but I hope you understand I can't be absolute on this without verification
- jquery 7y ago
  Keep in mind I don’t know exactly how those conversations went between Boeing and the FAA, nor do I know exactly who my dad was referring to when he said Boeing (the head of engineering? head of safety? A group of people inside Boeing? Was Boeing unified in its opinion or was this concentrated in the area of engineering my father worked in?) Grounding an entire class of plane is not a decision made lightly because of the huge financial and political implications. My takeaway is Boeing leaned towards grounding and the FAA did not and on balance the plane stayed in the air while Boeing worked on the fixes.* *EDIT: This is probably a conversation that happens after every crash/major-incident and hindsight is 20/20.
mikeash 7y ago
Boeing probably doesn’t have the ability to ground their fleet with legal force, but if they said, “these planes aren’t safe, don’t fly them until we can investigate and fix,” most airlines would listen and I don’t think the FAA could somehow block this.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  A statement like that would also be corporate suicide. Imagine the lawsuits.
  - mikeash 7y ago
    Would it really be worse than having a government agency forcibly ground your planes for safety reasons?
    - brokenmachine 7y ago
      IANAL but I think Boeing exposes themselves to less liability with FAA making the decision to ground them to investigate.
- jquery 7y ago
  I’m not absolving Boeing of responsibility, just adding some color to the conversation.
blackflame7000 7y ago
If you look at the Top 7 safest airplanes in terms of accidents per hours flown you get: 1) Airbus A340 - No crashes 2) Boeing 777 - 5 crashes, 2 intentional (Malaysia x2), 1 engine-related (Rolls-Royce problem), 2 pilot-error (Asiana/Dubai) - [Thanks fishywang] 3) Boeing 747-8 4) Boeing 737-NG 5) Boeing 767 6) Airbus A320 7) Boeing 757
- fishywang 7y ago
  Did you miss the Asiana 777 at SFO? Or is that engine-related?
  - FDSGSG 7y ago
    That one was stupidity-related.
    - jquery 7y ago
      I was always irrationally nervous flying into SFO, worried about precisely what ended up happening. We should all be glad the plane mostly held together through the cartwheel, saving many lives.
      - WalterBright 7y ago
        I can confidently assert that no airframe is designed with cartwheeling in mind. Nor hitting trees/buildings/cliffs.
        jquery 7y ago
        True, it's not part of the certification process, but I do know that modern jets airframes are made to be as... um... "flexible"* (? searching for the word here...) as possible in catastrophic situations. An older airframe probably would have disintegrated under the same forces. Luck and good fortune also played a huge role of course. What the pilots did was unconscionably neglectful. CFIT is often (usually?) fatal for all passengers. *EDIT: It's similar to software that's written to be extremely robust that encounters an unexpected error (or set of errors). The software wasn't necessarily designed to handle it, but sometimes it can nonetheless.

thfuran 7y ago

And another question is how many of our systems that we rely on, from bridges to airplanes to traffic lights, are just actually very insecure I'd guess virtually all of them.

mtgx 7y ago
Worse yet, many cities want to become "smart" (pushed by iot companies' sales people in part).
munk-a 7y ago
How likely do you think it is that a company that manufactures traffic lights and incidentally builds the software to control them would cough up 40+/hr to have someone independent come in and vet the software that was written for 12/hr and seems to work just fine? Part of this is just a poor understanding and pricing for software consultancy - along with some absolutely terrible actors in the HPC realm. Ideally your HPC will come in and spend a fraction of the time vetting software that the dev team built, but occasionally you get a fraud who works 8/5 for a month at 120/hr and delivers nothing but vapor in the end. Maybe some security consultant industry group could set up a certification program, though all the times in memory I've seen software related certification it's been 1. Absolute BS in terms of skills evaluated. 2. A money grab by the certifier.

jdavis703 7y ago

I can tell you traffic lights are extremely insecure. Last month there was a traffic light that was turned the wrong way, such that it was impossible to tell if the light was green. So I climbed the poll and turned it to the right direction. Another fellow pedastrian thanked me. A bad actor could do anything from a DOS (positioning it the wrong direction) to tampering with the bulbs (for example swapping out all the greens with reds). The reason most society doesn't collapse is because we assume most people are good actors. Unfortunately once your device is hooked up to the internet you vastly increase the odds of dealing with bad actors and have to spend more time and money securing against bad actors.

brokenmachine 7y ago
All the traffic lights here in Australia are honking great big metal poles that you'd need some serious equipment to reposition. Swapping bulbs would be a big operation too. What country are you in that has rotatable traffic lights?
- johannes1234321 7y ago
  Even if the traffic lights can't be rotsteted it's relatively trivial for an bad actor to break it in some way and hanging up your permanent green light at night and then watch the chaos. As gp said: The amount of such bad actors is low. And gains from an individual hack are low and there's a chance of getting caught.
  - Waterluvian 7y ago
    "Relatively trivial" must be relative. Traffic lights where I am require a cherry picker in the intersection to get at. This is like hacking servers. If you can get all the way to physical access with the device, of course it's exploitable. But that doesn't actually say a lot about how secure something is. I imagine the quality of the lights around the world differ. If you can climb up and adjust it, these aren't the kinds of lights I'm thinking of.
    - 7y ago

TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago

>how many of our systems that we rely on, from bridges to traffic lights, are just actually very insecure but either nobody notices or nobody exploits them I write software that is critical for public safety customers (think police/firefighters). Maybe this is just my perspective having left a defense company but it is terribly insecure. The “secure” version of our product was obviously an after thought, it was poorly executed and i dont think it’s even used widely. And my company dominates this market, so the attack surface is huge