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Can a Passenger Hack an Airplane?
- coolThingsFirst 3y agoHow hard can it be. Just brute force the admin password and fly the plane like in GTA as the pilots lose their minds.
- wombat-man 3y agoWASD will work right?
- cantSpellSober 3y agoHah, brute forcing is more complicated than what they even had to do > Some of them had [PINs] as simple as four zeros. Some of them had the pilot’s birthdate as the PIN, which obviously you can get from open sources.
- photoGrant 3y agoIf 1Password are beginning to drop clickbait blog posts like this -- it tells me something.
- cantSpellSober 3y agoHoliday promo season has arrived?
- mrabcx 3y agoThe passenger entertainment system typically displays some information related to flight location, speed, altitude, ETA and so on. Where does that info come from ? If it does come from the "Aircraft Control Domain, or ACD" then these two systems are probably not "completely isolated" as claimed in the article?
- mschuster91 3y agoA 10$ GPS antenna can give you this information... just without the performance guarantees that come with glass cockpit equipment.
- kzrdude 3y agoA regular phone can also give you this information, just be seated at the window (I guess) for best reception of GPS data. The GPS test app is nice for this.
- maayank 3y agoCan it though? The chips in 10$ AFAIK have hardware limitation built in to cut/fudge output on high (air traffic scale) speeds.
- zaxomi 3y agoCoordinating Committee for Multilateral Export Controls (COCOM) limits is 1,000 knots (510 m/s) and/or at an altitude higher than 18,000 m (59,000 feet). Commercial airliners usually have a service ceiling at about 40000 feet and a speed below the speed of sound (343 m/s). Even with a very strong jet stream of 100 m/s it's below the limit. The Concorde had a service ceiling of 60000 feet and maximum speed of 605 m/s.
- dharmab 3y agoCOCOM is technically AND, so you can buy some receivers which will work with one or the other condition.
- wafflemaker 3y agoYou can use Open Street Maps to monitor the flight without the internet connection. I often use it to watch how the plane speeds up for take off and slows down for landing. Sometimes you have to keep the phone closer to the window. Luckily you get the list of currently connected GPS sats so you can debug whether hiccups are software/hardware related or poor GPS coverage. It's lot of fun observing how early planes start going down in altitude before landing or trying to guess river and city names from up top.
- sandworm101 3y ago>> What’s the worst that could happen? Bad press coverage? A flashed bomb threat. Flight doesn't take off, or is diverted to an alternate airfield, or otherwise misses its connection. That sort of thing can quickly cascade into six or seven cost figures. A widespread attack across a fleet could be crippling, at least the first time it happens.
- svantana 3y agoRight, but if the perpetrator has to be on board, they run a pretty big risk of getting caught for a serious crime. While I imagine a called-in threat can have a similar effect, with much less risk.
- mike_hock 3y agoThe perpetrator doesn't have to be on board, only a device previously hacked by the perpetrator has to be on board.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- tycho-newman 3y agoPfft. Just make a GUI in HTML using Visual Basic.
- usrbinbash 3y agoSo the answer is: "No they cannot".
- cantSpellSober 3y agoNo it's not, granted the headline makes it sound scarier than the reality. > we did find ways to compromise the in-flight entertainment systems. But one of the limitations of our research is that the airplanes that are being retired – they’re the old ones. One of the systems we were working on was 27 years old. It was running Windows NT 4.0. > We also discovered vulnerabilities in some of the apps, which meant if someone had compromised one of these tablets, they could mess around with the calculations [that] tell the pilot how much power they need > the first vulnerability we found, Boeing came back to us within 24 hours and said, “We agree with you"
- sbarre 3y agoSecurity researcher Chris Roberts FAFO'ed with this some years back. It cost him his consulting company if I recall? https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-plane/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-com...
- replwoacause 3y agoWow, that guy sounds like a total idiot. I was shocked to read how brazen his actions were and if it’s true he commandeered control over the plane and made it list to the side as stated in the article, he belongs in jail.
- closewith 3y agoEven if it's not true, the fact he thought that's what he was doing and he continued should ban him from air travel.
- sbarre 3y agoIronically he is now the CISO for Boom Supersonic[0]. 0: https://boomsupersonic.com/ https://boomsupersonic.com/
- rafram 3y agoWow, I can’t believe that they’ve actually secured orders from major airlines. Didn’t they learn their lesson with the Concorde?
- speedgoose 3y agoAirFrance and British Airways are not listed.
- wsgeorge 3y ago> Didn’t they learn their lesson with the Concorde? What was the lesson?
- wslh 3y agoI would add one more thing about hacking IN an airplane (not "a plane"): with the chat app included in many flights you can scam people and do other kind of funny things interacting between unknown people in the flight. Have done pranks to my family there.
- flemhans 3y agoWill this article please get to the point!
- exegete 3y agoEveryone is dismissing the headline as clickbait. The interesting part is the discussion on Electronic Flight Bags and their security. Seems like a gap.
- spacecadet 3y agoMy wife shared a tiktok with me last year, which was clips of an American Airlines flight, Airbus Plane, and someone had "hijacked" the speaker system. I combed the Airbus manuals and maintaince PDFs and found that those planes have several exposed compact flash ports for "pre-flight audio". I hypothesized that either the copilot lost a bet or someone slipped a pre-recorded track into one of those slots... /shrug, but Im still interested in those CF card slots...
- gloyoyo 3y agoWow. Given the amount of things that can be done with audio networking, and or connections via wireless to a CF card, this seems like something that should be considered.
- spacecadet 3y agoWell, they are non-obvious slots near Flight Attendant stations and high traffic areas. I wont say I hung out near them on a flight and observed traffic patterns, nor did I observe periods in the rear of the plane where one CF slot was unattended. I forget the exact model now, but Im leaving out alot of detail. There are assumptions in the "unattended slot" hypothesis. For one, the slots need to be set to an autoplay, which is not a given, and if not- requires navigating a complex and dated touch screen.
- weinzierl 3y agoIf I remember correctly CF was just a stripped down PCMCIA which in principle is capable of DMA.
- ctxc 3y agoQuite the acronym soup, but off I am to Google it...
- ctxc 3y agoAndd I'm back. Got to love when it all comes together :P CF is compact flash card, kind of like the big memory card in cameras. PCMCIA is a PC card whose function is to "introduce peripheral capability to a laptop", kind of an interface. DMA is direct memory access.
- cjbprime 3y ago> The airplane networks are very carefully segregated. You have a bit in the cabin that’s called the Passenger Information Entertainment Services Domain. That’s completely isolated from what we call the Aircraft Control Domain, or ACD. Seems to raise the question of where the nearest connection to the ACD is, from the passenger cabin.
- grammers 3y agoTo save you some reading: > Can a passenger hack the airplane from their seat? They can’t.
- eastbound 3y agoHowever, I’m surprised they don’t protect us more against hacked phones. When each iPhone is 4,000mAh, it could cause quite a fire, let alone entire laptops. Is the entire security theater based on the trust that terrorists won’t short-circuit batteries?
- mynameisvlad 3y agoIs there any documented case of a phone being hacked to make their batteries explode? This seems to be a reach at best.
- eastbound 3y agoDoes it matter? “Is there a record of a perfectly feasible method of terrorism being used? No? Then it doesn’t happen” ?
- tempotemporary 3y agoAccording to this article https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-plane/ https://www.wired.com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-com... a researcher was able to take use cat6 ethernet from airplane entertainment module built into a seat.. So it depends.
- okdood64 3y agohttps://archive.is/Q1jdu https://archive.is/Q1jdu > Chris Roberts, a security researcher with One World Labs, told the FBI agent during an interview in February that he had hacked the in-flight entertainment system, or IFE, on an airplane and overwrote code on the plane’s Thrust Management Computer while aboard the flight. He was able to issue a climb command and make the plane briefly change course, the document states. > “He stated that he thereby caused one of the airplane engines to climb resulting in a lateral or sideways movement of the plane during one of these flights,” FBI Special Agent Mark Hurley wrote in his warrant application Goes without saying this is so reckless and dangerous. Was he ever charged? I couldn't find any information.
- seeknotfind 3y agoScript kiddies of the future would own the airplanes of today.
- dom96 3y agoThis article has some of the most frustrating uses of quotations I’ve seen: they’re placed right beside the paragraph they quote and they are exactly the same as the paragraph, so it’s forcing you to read the same thing multiple times.
- averageRoyalty 3y agoIt's infuriating. Some literally have a single sentence between. And some are actually misquoted! Who is this possibly for?
- hilbert42 3y agoSome years ago I was on a Lauder Air flight and somehow unintentionally crashed out the in-flight entertainment system when switching channels, fiddling with the buttons or such and ended up with the OS command prompt. Not exactly life-threatening but it ought not to have happened.