6 ms·

> buying an aviation radio off the shelf and just chatting on the frequency or issuing fake clearances if you want to be a mass murderer Incidentally, I am hap

by FabHK 7y ago

> buying an aviation radio off the shelf and just chatting on the frequency or issuing fake clearances if you want to be a mass murderer Incidentally, I am happily surprised that that never seems to happen. One could so easily create so much chaos at an airport... There is no authentication whatsoever.

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago
But the risks and consequences are catastrophic. The Feds will put you away forever for even attempting it.
- voxl 7y ago
  While true, you'd think state sponsored terrorism wouldn't care about sacrificing a few people.
  - vkou 7y ago
    What kind of state sponsored terrorism? Black ops programs? Air forces dropping bombs? Assassinations and decapitation strikes? Or are we talking about the boogieman that is an excuse for all sorts of paranoid crackdowns, expenditures, and questionable legislature? Who exactly are you afraid will sponsor radio jammers at airports, and why do you think they will do so?
  - TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
    actually, I'd think state sponsored terrorism would have the resources to get away with it. Just send the voice data through a raspberry pi to a remote location and carry out the attack from there. You could send voice data through a TOR-like protocol or something to keep you anonymous, if that's important. You could maybe rig some explosives to go off if the FBI/FCC/FAA gain access to the attack point, to prevent them from recovering evidence. Lot's of police/fire radio systems are similarly without authentication, so you could amplify the mayhem by doing the same thing to those frequencies.
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    With state sponsored terrorism, the risk isn't that the Feds will put the agent away forever, it's that the USG (and, incidentally, other particularly allowed countries) will identify that it is state sponsored terrorism and treat the attack as exactly what it is—simultaneously and act of war and a gross violation of the laws of war.
- TkTech 7y ago
  And most major airports have systems like RFEye or AIRPORT-SHIELD. You would be _immediately_ pinpointed with a remarkable level of accuracy from 3-6 sensors. Especially near major metro areas, unintentional interference is a daily issue. These systems immediately triangulate sources of interference in a wide band. Or you have simpler systems like UMS100 that just do alerting and you send out an engineer with a wand to walk around for a bit to triangulate it.
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    These could be pretty easily defeated through a multitude of tactics. They're just being pitched as a stop gap solution against the low hanging fruit like morons with drones or a drunk person with an airband handheld.
  - echelon 7y ago
    Imagine an unlicensed drone emitting GPS radio signals. Just a small amount of sophistication and an attacker can do an incredible amount of harm.
    - asteli 7y ago
      If you live in Florida, you can go down to the pawn shop, buy a gun, drive over to the airport and start shooting at planes. Doesn't take much sophistication to cause a lot of harm.
      - Piskvorrr 7y ago
        At a plane. Then you get a SWAT response and terrorism charges - consequences are also a reason this doesn't happen on a mass scale.
  - tropo 7y ago
    With an omnidirectional antenna, sure. With a high-gain antenna, no. The attacker could entirely avoid the RFEye or AIRPORT-SHIELD. The attacker could pick a specific aircraft to pester, with no other aircraft able to listen. Add some fancy voice synthesis, and it gets interesting. The attacker could clone the voice and style of the air traffic controller. The attacker could provide enough power to quiet out any other transmissions. To keep the air traffic controller incompletely aware, the attacker could provide interference (just to the tower) whenever the victim aircraft begins to transmit.
AWildC182 7y ago
It happens sometimes [1] It actually happened near me once when a local crazy guy got mad that planes were flying near his house (he bought a house right across the street from the municipal airport) so he found an airband radio and started yelling at them every time they came too close for his liking. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvA_-linhg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvA_-linhg8
- Scoundreller 7y ago
  Wiarton is pretty far from Toronto. But I dunno how many receiving/sending antennae they have for « Toronto Centre ».
  - AWildC182 7y ago
    Toronto Centre is in the top level of the ATC hierarchy and is a geographic area rather than specific to the city of Toronto. Airband AM only has a range of 50-200mi in flight so they have outlying stations, usually colocated with VOR stations IIRC. He probably got lucky and had a station within 5-10 miles of his bathtub... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Area_Control_Centre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Area_Control_Centre
korethr 7y ago
I'm kind of wondering if there even needs to be. If you keyed up on frequency near a major airport as described in the GP, I'm pretty sure the FAA and FCC would be working together to track you down in short order. I could see the argument that it would be good to add authentication to the radios to complement the strict enforcement for a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach. However, I think a more pressing concern for aviation radio is that is is kept simpler, and thus with fewer failure modes, and thus more reliable Because when you need that radio in an emergency, that has to be the worst possible time to have to deal with authentication hiccups.
- LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
  Could they? A moving target? Say the soundproofed back of some van.
  - zentiggr 7y ago
    I personally would volunteer to be on one of the teams in another van with directional antennas to triangulate your transmissions and shut down you ASAP. The fact that no one has ever truly tried that sort of poisoning of radio calls is more due to the tower and aircraft having a very well defined set of calls, so that the likelihood of false transmissions being able to cause havoc is minimized already. I agree with another commenter that aviation radio systems should be the simplest, most reliable systems possible, and have that layer of communication depend on proper radio call discipline and no more.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
      My question was of theoretical nature, i'm not up to mischief of that sort. Though i'm often thinking about the vulnerabilities of our technological society, and the (false) assumptions we have about that. Compare it with lock picking. Most are easily bumped, or not even bothering with that, the door kicked down, some window used instead, and so on. Now, when someone kicks your door down, that's getting noticed, sooner or later. But what about cheap SBCs dropped somewhere with a battery and some custom periphery working as a relay? Of course the SUVs could find that. After the fact.
briandear 7y ago
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/oceania/australia/articles/hoax-caller-impersonating-air-traffic-control-forces-pilot-to-abort-landing/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/oceania/aust... It happens rarely, but pilots are also trained to not blindly follow clearances. They are still pilot in command.
Patrick_Devine 7y ago
The problem with _requiring_ authentication is that it can create a safety issue when communications break down. As a pilot it's not a bad idea to carry a spare handheld radio, or even use a cel phone, when you lose communications. I was flying once with a buddy of mine who was Pilot-In-Command and we lost (or thought we had lost) our radio on an IFR flight back into the Bay Area. What had happened was the Push-to-Talk button on the yoke had become stuck and we were transmitting the entire time while attempting to diagnose what was wrong. This happened for about five minutes. Thankfully he had a handheld radio in his flight bag, and when we turned it on we figured out really quickly what was going on. In that scenario, if we didn't have the handheld radio, it would have caused a worse problem.
- tdhoot 7y ago
  Pilots do train for communication failures. ATC at most airports has a number you can call to be patched through if your radio stops working and I've heard multiple cases of people having to use it. In the worst case, there are non-verbal methods of communication that pilots or ATC can employ (ATC can send light signals, pilots rock their wings to signal communication failures, etc.)
- leetrout 7y ago
  Now I'm trying to remember if the radios have TX lights that would help show that you are transmitting...
  - briandear 7y ago
    G1000/G3000 radios do. TX and RX
    - kitteh 7y ago
      G1000 will disable tx if you are transmitting for 35 seconds straight I think as a way to mitigate a stuck mic.
  - ddoolin 7y ago
    Yes, even many old school radios will have something that indicates transmitting or not.
walrus01 7y ago
> Incidentally, I am happily surprised that that never seems to happen. One could so easily create so much chaos at an airport... There is no authentication whatsoever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband One of the reasons why airband radio uses amplitude modulation is so that a much more powerful transmitter (ground based, operated by air traffic control or tower personnel, with access to very high Tx powers), can transmit on top of spurious transmissions coming from low powered aircraft or handheld transmitters. The big ground based Tx can step on an interloper and communicate its message to all aircraft on the same frequency.

by FabHK 7y ago

qrbLPHiKpiux 7y ago

But the risks and consequences are catastrophic. The Feds will put you away forever for even attempting it.

voxl 7y ago
While true, you'd think state sponsored terrorism wouldn't care about sacrificing a few people.
- vkou 7y ago
  What kind of state sponsored terrorism? Black ops programs? Air forces dropping bombs? Assassinations and decapitation strikes? Or are we talking about the boogieman that is an excuse for all sorts of paranoid crackdowns, expenditures, and questionable legislature? Who exactly are you afraid will sponsor radio jammers at airports, and why do you think they will do so?
- TheSoftwareGuy 7y ago
  actually, I'd think state sponsored terrorism would have the resources to get away with it. Just send the voice data through a raspberry pi to a remote location and carry out the attack from there. You could send voice data through a TOR-like protocol or something to keep you anonymous, if that's important. You could maybe rig some explosives to go off if the FBI/FCC/FAA gain access to the attack point, to prevent them from recovering evidence. Lot's of police/fire radio systems are similarly without authentication, so you could amplify the mayhem by doing the same thing to those frequencies.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  With state sponsored terrorism, the risk isn't that the Feds will put the agent away forever, it's that the USG (and, incidentally, other particularly allowed countries) will identify that it is state sponsored terrorism and treat the attack as exactly what it is—simultaneously and act of war and a gross violation of the laws of war.
TkTech 7y ago
And most major airports have systems like RFEye or AIRPORT-SHIELD. You would be _immediately_ pinpointed with a remarkable level of accuracy from 3-6 sensors. Especially near major metro areas, unintentional interference is a daily issue. These systems immediately triangulate sources of interference in a wide band. Or you have simpler systems like UMS100 that just do alerting and you send out an engineer with a wand to walk around for a bit to triangulate it.
- AWildC182 7y ago
  These could be pretty easily defeated through a multitude of tactics. They're just being pitched as a stop gap solution against the low hanging fruit like morons with drones or a drunk person with an airband handheld.
- echelon 7y ago
  Imagine an unlicensed drone emitting GPS radio signals. Just a small amount of sophistication and an attacker can do an incredible amount of harm.
  - asteli 7y ago
    If you live in Florida, you can go down to the pawn shop, buy a gun, drive over to the airport and start shooting at planes. Doesn't take much sophistication to cause a lot of harm.
    - Piskvorrr 7y ago
      At a plane. Then you get a SWAT response and terrorism charges - consequences are also a reason this doesn't happen on a mass scale.
- tropo 7y ago
  With an omnidirectional antenna, sure. With a high-gain antenna, no. The attacker could entirely avoid the RFEye or AIRPORT-SHIELD. The attacker could pick a specific aircraft to pester, with no other aircraft able to listen. Add some fancy voice synthesis, and it gets interesting. The attacker could clone the voice and style of the air traffic controller. The attacker could provide enough power to quiet out any other transmissions. To keep the air traffic controller incompletely aware, the attacker could provide interference (just to the tower) whenever the victim aircraft begins to transmit.

AWildC182 7y ago

It happens sometimes [1] It actually happened near me once when a local crazy guy got mad that planes were flying near his house (he bought a house right across the street from the municipal airport) so he found an airband radio and started yelling at them every time they came too close for his liking. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvA_-linhg8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZvA_-linhg8

Scoundreller 7y ago
Wiarton is pretty far from Toronto. But I dunno how many receiving/sending antennae they have for « Toronto Centre ».
- AWildC182 7y ago
  Toronto Centre is in the top level of the ATC hierarchy and is a geographic area rather than specific to the city of Toronto. Airband AM only has a range of 50-200mi in flight so they have outlying stations, usually colocated with VOR stations IIRC. He probably got lucky and had a station within 5-10 miles of his bathtub... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Area_Control_Centre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toronto_Area_Control_Centre

korethr 7y ago

I'm kind of wondering if there even needs to be. If you keyed up on frequency near a major airport as described in the GP, I'm pretty sure the FAA and FCC would be working together to track you down in short order. I could see the argument that it would be good to add authentication to the radios to complement the strict enforcement for a sort of belt-and-suspenders approach. However, I think a more pressing concern for aviation radio is that is is kept simpler, and thus with fewer failure modes, and thus more reliable Because when you need that radio in an emergency, that has to be the worst possible time to have to deal with authentication hiccups.

LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
Could they? A moving target? Say the soundproofed back of some van.
- zentiggr 7y ago
  I personally would volunteer to be on one of the teams in another van with directional antennas to triangulate your transmissions and shut down you ASAP. The fact that no one has ever truly tried that sort of poisoning of radio calls is more due to the tower and aircraft having a very well defined set of calls, so that the likelihood of false transmissions being able to cause havoc is minimized already. I agree with another commenter that aviation radio systems should be the simplest, most reliable systems possible, and have that layer of communication depend on proper radio call discipline and no more.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 7y ago
    My question was of theoretical nature, i'm not up to mischief of that sort. Though i'm often thinking about the vulnerabilities of our technological society, and the (false) assumptions we have about that. Compare it with lock picking. Most are easily bumped, or not even bothering with that, the door kicked down, some window used instead, and so on. Now, when someone kicks your door down, that's getting noticed, sooner or later. But what about cheap SBCs dropped somewhere with a battery and some custom periphery working as a relay? Of course the SUVs could find that. After the fact.

briandear 7y ago

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/oceania/australia/articles/hoax-caller-impersonating-air-traffic-control-forces-pilot-to-abort-landing/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/oceania/aust... It happens rarely, but pilots are also trained to not blindly follow clearances. They are still pilot in command.

Patrick_Devine 7y ago

The problem with _requiring_ authentication is that it can create a safety issue when communications break down. As a pilot it's not a bad idea to carry a spare handheld radio, or even use a cel phone, when you lose communications. I was flying once with a buddy of mine who was Pilot-In-Command and we lost (or thought we had lost) our radio on an IFR flight back into the Bay Area. What had happened was the Push-to-Talk button on the yoke had become stuck and we were transmitting the entire time while attempting to diagnose what was wrong. This happened for about five minutes. Thankfully he had a handheld radio in his flight bag, and when we turned it on we figured out really quickly what was going on. In that scenario, if we didn't have the handheld radio, it would have caused a worse problem.

tdhoot 7y ago
Pilots do train for communication failures. ATC at most airports has a number you can call to be patched through if your radio stops working and I've heard multiple cases of people having to use it. In the worst case, there are non-verbal methods of communication that pilots or ATC can employ (ATC can send light signals, pilots rock their wings to signal communication failures, etc.)
leetrout 7y ago
Now I'm trying to remember if the radios have TX lights that would help show that you are transmitting...
- briandear 7y ago
  G1000/G3000 radios do. TX and RX
  - kitteh 7y ago
    G1000 will disable tx if you are transmitting for 35 seconds straight I think as a way to mitigate a stuck mic.
- ddoolin 7y ago
  Yes, even many old school radios will have something that indicates transmitting or not.

walrus01 7y ago

> Incidentally, I am happily surprised that that never seems to happen. One could so easily create so much chaos at an airport... There is no authentication whatsoever. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airband One of the reasons why airband radio uses amplitude modulation is so that a much more powerful transmitter (ground based, operated by air traffic control or tower personnel, with access to very high Tx powers), can transmit on top of spurious transmissions coming from low powered aircraft or handheld transmitters. The big ground based Tx can step on an interloper and communicate its message to all aircraft on the same frequency.