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Why do you think the ATC will hear it? You can use a high gain antenna. Also, you can play some really nasty tricks with things that override the ATC, such as T

Why do you think the ATC will hear it? You can use a high gain antenna. Also, you can play some really nasty tricks with things that override the ATC, such as TCAS. Or things that are independent of the ATC, like that faulty engine readings sent over ACARS that I mentioned earlier. There really is no way to do it safe without authentication codes or digital signatures. PS. And the readback can be just jammed.

seabass-labrax 3y ago
You're absouletly right. Here's a pretty good article covering some of the attacks that could be done against radio navigation systems: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/the-radio-navigation-planes-use-to-land-safely-is-insecure-and-can-be-hacked/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/the-r... On a foggy day when the visibility is right at minimums, I can imagine a huge risk of aircraft being sent off-course right before landing. Hopefully the pilots would still be able to recover the situation - the TOGA button is right there on the thrust levers on most aircraft - but nobody is infallible. I would imagine that some military transport aircraft have backup, INS-based navigation systems that create a synthetic glidepath without external radio signals. Airbus have been trying to introduce such systems on commercial airliners for quite a while, although that is intended to allow landing on more remote runways rather than specifically to improve security against malicious interference. All that is to say that the lack of fatal aviation accidents that we know were caused by malicious radio interference doesn't in any way make the attack less feasible. Digital signatures, even with conventional X509 certificates straight out of the OpenSSL library, would go a long way to mitigate this risk. What about the risk of the signatures failing? The worst-case scenario is that the pilots get a warning on their ECAM display: "Comms not secure". That should at least alert them to the possibility of false readings even if it can't correct them.
psunavy03 3y ago
I don't think you have a very good grasp of how aircraft operate under instrument flight rules. Lots of what you're describing is along the same lines as saying "if whole bunches of people decided to start crashing into things or firing sniper rifles from overpasses, it'd create major havoc on the roads, and therefore our roads are insecure." Well, duh. But until there's a credible threat of that occurring, it's not worth worrying about.
- H8crilA 3y ago
  It takes just 1 person who knows a bit about radio and aviation and maybe $1000-$2000 worth of hardware to pull off such an attack. And we know that terror organisations go to much further lengths to make it to the press headlines.
  - psunavy03 3y ago
    If a terror organization wanted to do that, they'd probably end up using rifles or missiles. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
    - H8crilA 3y ago
      Rifles do not reach airplanes, and SAM systems are quite tightly controlled. For example Hamas is unable to take out even any of the slow piston engine Israeli surveillance drones. They even have a name for them in Arabic, you can hear the sound of the drone in almost any footage from Gaza.
      - psunavy03 3y ago
        Rifles can reach airplanes on the ground just fine, MANPADs have a habit of popping up in inconvenient third-world conflicts, and this whole idea that we need to have secure ATC comms and need to rewire our navigation system is still an absurdity. Every modern airliner has dual-redundant or better GPS-aided inertial navigation systems, and every professional pilot is trained on procedures for flying in the airspace system after losing all their (multiple) radios. This is literally not a risk worth spending the millions/billions it would cost to mitigate, any more than Joe Average Internet User needs to hire a professional cybersecurity firm to secure his home Wi-Fi router.

seabass-labrax 3y ago

You're absouletly right. Here's a pretty good article covering some of the attacks that could be done against radio navigation systems: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/the-radio-navigation-planes-use-to-land-safely-is-insecure-and-can-be-hacked/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/05/the-r... On a foggy day when the visibility is right at minimums, I can imagine a huge risk of aircraft being sent off-course right before landing. Hopefully the pilots would still be able to recover the situation - the TOGA button is right there on the thrust levers on most aircraft - but nobody is infallible. I would imagine that some military transport aircraft have backup, INS-based navigation systems that create a synthetic glidepath without external radio signals. Airbus have been trying to introduce such systems on commercial airliners for quite a while, although that is intended to allow landing on more remote runways rather than specifically to improve security against malicious interference. All that is to say that the lack of fatal aviation accidents that we know were caused by malicious radio interference doesn't in any way make the attack less feasible. Digital signatures, even with conventional X509 certificates straight out of the OpenSSL library, would go a long way to mitigate this risk. What about the risk of the signatures failing? The worst-case scenario is that the pilots get a warning on their ECAM display: "Comms not secure". That should at least alert them to the possibility of false readings even if it can't correct them.

psunavy03 3y ago

I don't think you have a very good grasp of how aircraft operate under instrument flight rules. Lots of what you're describing is along the same lines as saying "if whole bunches of people decided to start crashing into things or firing sniper rifles from overpasses, it'd create major havoc on the roads, and therefore our roads are insecure." Well, duh. But until there's a credible threat of that occurring, it's not worth worrying about.

H8crilA 3y ago
It takes just 1 person who knows a bit about radio and aviation and maybe $1000-$2000 worth of hardware to pull off such an attack. And we know that terror organisations go to much further lengths to make it to the press headlines.
- psunavy03 3y ago
  If a terror organization wanted to do that, they'd probably end up using rifles or missiles. https://xkcd.com/538/ https://xkcd.com/538/
  - H8crilA 3y ago
    Rifles do not reach airplanes, and SAM systems are quite tightly controlled. For example Hamas is unable to take out even any of the slow piston engine Israeli surveillance drones. They even have a name for them in Arabic, you can hear the sound of the drone in almost any footage from Gaza.
    - psunavy03 3y ago
      Rifles can reach airplanes on the ground just fine, MANPADs have a habit of popping up in inconvenient third-world conflicts, and this whole idea that we need to have secure ATC comms and need to rewire our navigation system is still an absurdity. Every modern airliner has dual-redundant or better GPS-aided inertial navigation systems, and every professional pilot is trained on procedures for flying in the airspace system after losing all their (multiple) radios. This is literally not a risk worth spending the millions/billions it would cost to mitigate, any more than Joe Average Internet User needs to hire a professional cybersecurity firm to secure his home Wi-Fi router.