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No, but some firsthand experience in the cyber-security industry, and enough knowledge of how planes work to know its possible in principle. At least, assuming
by darawk 5y ago
No, but some firsthand experience in the cyber-security industry, and enough knowledge of how planes work to know its possible in principle. At least, assuming there are bugs in the onboard software, which i've no doubt there are.
EDIT: Planes are absorbing a tremendous amount of input from their environment at all times, both digital and analog. That input is, in many cases, being processed by software. Just to articulate the model a little further.
- _moof 5y agoI'm an avionics engineer with commercial flight ops experience and I'm extremely skeptical of this hypothesis.
- Kostchei 5y agoAustralia has had over the horizon radar for decades. Maybe there is a 2020+ version that is sufficiently fine grained to use for training to the target.
- darawk 5y agoYou very well could be right. It just seems to me that the surface area is large, and the value of exploitation is high. Anything from targeting sensors on the plane with lasers, to exploiting ground stations / satellites / IFF systems, to interdicting component supply chains and inserting remotely triggerable flaws. These are just the things that hit my particular mind immediately, but i'm sure there are many other possibilities. Keep in mind that military aircraft have tons of specialized systems on them that civillian aircraft do not. And further, that countries would be willing to spend, literally, billions of dollars to build systems that could exploit flaws like this. So even for quite exotic ideas like say, designing ground objects with exotic shapes that have radar signatures that trigger flaws in onboard processing software, or whatever. I'm just making things up here, but there are undoubtedly teams of physicists, avionics experts and cybersecurity experts tasked with studying this, even if just to ensure our systems are not vulnerable to it. It's possible that all that has come to nothing, but it would not surprise me if it hasn't.
- DenisM 5y agoLike, a giant and malformed QR code on the ground, causing a buffer overrun?
- darawk 5y agoMore like lasers manipulating sensors on the plane, or MITMing/jamming comms with ground/satellites/IFF systems, or interdicting component supply chains and inserting flaws into chips/sensors/controllers that can be triggered remotely. I don't claim to know exactly what anyone is doing, just that the surface area is large, the value of exploitation is high, and therefore countries would be willing to spend large amounts of money to obtain those capabilities.