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Protecting Cities from Hijacked Planes
Kong99 writes "A group at UC-Berkeley has proposed Soft Walls to stop hijacked planes from entering a protected airspace. Interesting read especially since they claim it is 'hack' proof."
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This is a really cool idea. I'm all for it.
Just one concern...what's to stop the hijackers from busting the autopilot controls in the cockpit? I would think that it would be sensitive to bullets or repeated bashing. It's not like you need an autopilot when you're right next to a city, just point the nose and go. What kind of range should these no fly zones have, and what should be protocol for when an airport is in/next to a city?
Even if this process is hack-proof (yet to be seen), anything that forcibly takes control away from the pilot is going to be dangerous. What if the only way to avoid a mid-air collision is to bank into one of these "soft walls"?
Phoenix
How long until someone creates a "softwall" around LAX :)
Never claim anything is hack-proof if you don't want to get hacked.
Especially do not claim that safety-critical systems are hack-proof, since even people who wouldn't normally try to hack them will try.
It's like security through obscurity- in this case more like security through non-boasting. The same thing applies- it doesn't really make you more secure, but it stops a lot of people from trying.
graspee
The twin tower attack was a one-time thing; neither it nor anything like it will ever work again, especially after all the media attention and tactical commentary the attack received.
This is a solution to a problem which will never come up again in anything near the form it did. It's interesting to think about and expand our engineering knowhow with but it's worthless as a Real Solution to a Real Problem.
Peace in the middle east would also solve a good portion of the problem (from an engineering perspective) and it doesn't cost millions of dollars. AND it is immune to hacking.
-n
They propose modifying the avionics in aircraft so that the plane would fight any efforts by the pilot to fly into restricted airspace
Somehow this makes me feel a little less safe. I know that so much of flying is electronically controlled now anyway, with autopilot and more, but the there still is the ability for the pilot to actively fly the plane if it becomes necessary, without the plane "fighting" him or here.
What if the terrorist attack came in a different way, and the pilot had to make "evasive maneuvors" (sp!) or something?
[SIG] It's like putting a moose in the blender -- a recipe for disaster!
So if a plane was flying with a no-fly-zone to he left, and the pilot started banking left to enter the zone, the avionics would counter by banking right. Lee's system, called "soft walls", would first gently resist the pilot, and then become increasingly forceful until it prevailed.
I can't say I like the idea of a computer having the final say over the direction of an airplane. Even if the intentions are good, pilots need to have the final say. Even Air Traffic Control can't force a maneuver on a pilot, if he or she thinks it is not safe.
In other words: I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you fly there.
The system would include an on-board database of the GPS coordinates of the no-fly zones. If it sensed an attempt to jam GPS signals it would switch to other navigation aids such as airport beacons. Being independent of ground control means soft walls would be immune to hacking
Wishful thinking or willful ignorance?
The database would have to be updated prior to each flight, because the zones would have to be flexible. Points of entry are the main database at each airport, the central database at some government facility, and of course every single aircraft participating in this. Factor in the execptions you know the congresscritters cannot avoid putting into any sort of regulatory legislation, like exemptions from participation from non-commercial planes of a certain size or smaller, and you have a system so full of holes that it would hardly be worth the cost.
...claiming something is "hack-proof", or claiming that something like the 9/11 attacks will never happen again.
The reality is that people are [still] regularly getting contraband through security checkpoints. Great, there are bars on the cockpit doors now, but I'm not willing to bet thousands of lives on that alone.
I personally doubt anyone will TRY this type of attack in the near future, but to claim it will never work again seems pretty bold.
Hmm... Suppose that a plane were somehow to take off with a database of no-fly zones that listed all of the airports within a 1000-mile radius of its destination? Suppose that an updated database is released that accidentally puts O'Hare in a no-fly zone, and it isn't discovered until planes start colliding with each other over Chicago? And what can be done to save a plane that has a corrupted database once it takes off? From the story, ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! You're doomed, see ya later.
Nice system. I'll walk, thanks.
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
Think like a terrorist for a second, will you.
So what if you can't slam a plane into a building? Your only limits are your creativity.
If the airplane's softwall control can't be hacked, then perhaps the terorrists can make planes crash into things by guiding them with `pirate soft walls'. Or just making planes crash. I don't think terorriats are lla that picky and choosy.
This is dumb.
When will American politics wake up and address the injustices that are the real root of the terrorist problem?
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Airport security has been stepped up to the point where you can't fart without getting a cavity search. The passengers nowadays will fight a hijacker, and everyone will be on high alert if a plane veers off course. I don't think that having someone crash a plane into a football stadium is going to happen because we're now expecting it. Just like with 9/11 if somebody's going to do a massive attack on civilians it's going to be in a way that nobody expects. All the security checkpoints and super high tech crap in the world won't stop someone who really wants to do damage at a target. They'll find your greatest weakness and strike it when you last expect it to happen. All this soft wall BS is a little something extra to make Joe Sixpack feel safe so he can continue drooling all over himself. (Mod me as a troll, but it really is true.)
It's just yet more knee-jerk reaction by people who get a warm fuzzy feeling from pretending they're doing something useful, when in reality they are just wasting time money and effort.
Which is why, of course, that thermonuclear devices have been launched by malicious hackers.
...
Oh, wait.
I mean, it's why the Stock Market has been compromised by evil criminal masterminds manipulating the prices via electronic subterfuge.
Oh, wait.
Oh, I mean that's why terrorists have been able to bring the air traffic control network down by hacking into it.
Oh, wait
I guess you're extrapolating from the fact that web sites are often hacked and Microsoft Outlook is vulnerable to worms to the grandiose implication that this sort of system is inherently vulnerable. I think that's a big stretch of an extrapolation.
The only thing that's not hack-proof is a system that's turned off, or broken too badly to run properly anyway. And maybe not even then.
And a missile can blow up a plane too. The terrorists on 9/11 were working with box cutters.
Feel free to mod me "-1 - Angry Jerk".
That doesn't apply to all muslims, specific sects - yes, but certainly not all. Also remember, muslim does not equal middle east, the religion is global.
They could even allow planes to be hijacked from the ground if terrorists managed to take over air-traffic control sites.
Well, duh, if it works by radio, people will listen to it and figure out how to take control. If some big dumb company like Microsoft makes it, there will be a buffer overflow in some unnecessary chunk that gives complete control of the flight control system. I imagine a scenerio where a terrorist sends the "air-clippy" a specially crafted message that either renders the controls inoperable or gives control to terroist on the ground. Ha ha is not very funny in the air.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
But Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11.
The odds of these things are low
But I'd bet good money the odds are much lower of a hijacker trying to use the plane as a missile.
Let's be blunt, planes are not used as massive suicide bombs on a regular basis. I don't know the stats, but I suspect a system like this would cause more problems than it was worth.
Everyone is raising all sorts of examples of situations where having a "Soft Wall" would be a very bad thing, and would cost lives.
I suspect Boeing is going along with this either because of a PHB who can't see past the end of his nose, or because they know it is too dangerous to implement but have to investigate it anyway for political reasons.
That or the article's claims of Boeing's involvement are overstated, inflated and limited to "They sold us some specs that are avaialbe to the general public."
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
This is a terrible idea for many reasons.
First, most cities are not "restricted airspace". There are no prohibitions against flying over all kinds of areas where just as much damage could be done as happened on 9/11. And in fact, you can't protect cities in this way, because they tend to put airports near cities. So this proposal fails to achieve its most basic security goal.
In fact, most restricted airspace is over isolated areas and is used for military training. It is restricted only so that combat pilots don't have to worry about accidentally ramming into jetliners.
Second, these days one of the main forms of security related restricted airspace is the Temporary Flight Restriction, TFR. This follows the president all over the country as he campaigns for the 2004 elections. But since the locations of the TFRs change daily and unpredictably, there would be no reliable way for the avionics to be loaded with the current TFR locations. Hence the proposal would fail to address one of the main current security concerns.
Third, there are significant safety issues involved. Every system is prone to failure. What happens when the gadget mistakenly activates and starts trying to turn the plane? The pilot will be fighting with the controls at a time when he may be distracted trying to land in bad weather. The system could easily kill many more people than it would save.
And fourth, there are occasions when there is a legitimate need to enter restricted airspace, such as during an emergency. A dumb gadget like this cannot be expected to understand that an engine is failing or that the control surfaces are damaged, and the pilot needs to get the plane on the ground pronto! Military bases, with their ultra-long runways and isolation from civilians, are ideal locations for emergency landings; but they are generally in restricted airspace. Again, imagine the scenario of trying to land a crippled airliner while battling a robot which insists that you don't have the right to land there!
All in all this is such a bad idea that it's clear that no one involved has any experience with the aviation business and what the real security issues are.
Basically what I'm saying is...if the pilot purposefully loses control of the plane towards the right direction, can the "soft wall" system regain control? I'd say probably not, and it sounds like this doesn't help any problem whatsoever, and it certainly creates some:
I can see a pilot maneuvering around a big city, getting in line to land...accidentally he starts to move towards the "soft wall"...the system forces him to return, right in the area where there are other airplanes. That sounds like a traffic control nightmare, one more thing for those poor guys to be aware of, one more thing to give them ulcers.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Uhm... so what's preventing someone from taking a baseball bat or some coffee to the system? If the autopilot system is out of comission, it simply can't work...
Sure, if you don't mind the plane crashing immediately after you do this, that's a great idea.
You can't fly a modern passenger jet without electronics. End of story.
ZFS: because love is never having to say fsck
Comatose passengers aren't likely to hijack a plane... Especially if they're isolated from the flight crew.
The way they did it in the 5th Element is the way to go...
/sig
To me it sounds like all you'd need to do is hack the computer system of the plane. Could it stop people? Yes, but it will just force terrorists to be more high tech. Plus, it would require updating every plane's software when the no fly zones changed. If the system is easy to update then it will probably be easy to alter maliciously.
-EndBabble
It's not going to happen again. The reason why three of the the four hijacked planes hit the attackers' targets is this: no one on the planes, not the pilots, not the passengers, not the attendents, had an inkling that the hijackers were intent on crashing the planes. It had never happened before.
Standard procedure for a hijacking is to cooperate with the hijackers to minimize harm to the people on the plane.
If the people on a hijacked plane know that they are on a doomed aircraft, the attackers have no leverage. The Pennsylvania flight was different from the other three in that the passengers ignored the-plane-will-crash-if-we-use-cellphones rule, called their families, got the lowdown, and then attacked the terrorists. The terrorists lost. The mission failed.
Mr. Shoe-Bomb also failed because the passengers gang-beat his ass. Mission failed.
Every plane hijacked in the future will have passengers that will not cooperate. The pilots won't cooperate. Missions to use airliners as bombs are now useless: any sane attacker will of course now use other methods.
Creating softwalls and turning our country into a AA-covered bunker is idiotic. Attacks via planes can't succeed. At the very least, the pilots will slam the plane into a field to save the lives of thousands.
I worry at the irrationality of the actions of the people of the U.S. Shutdown of the Constitution. Illegal attacks against non-threatening countries. Concentration camp in Cuba, complete with execution chamber (coming soon). Cameras everywhere. Reading everyone's mail.
You know, the attackers communicated face-to-face, so NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE STOPPED THEM.
We're turning the U.S. into an prison populated by people constantly agitated by their warden into a state of hysterical paranoia.
Listen, the people who really, really wanted to blow us up died in the planes. They are dead. They aren't in Iraq. They aren't everyone who speaks Arabic. They aren't being tortured in little white jail cells across the U.S.
Any future attack will come from a different front. And frankly, these men aren't that bright: they're cultists to begin with, so 9/10 of their brain cells are useless anyway.
The few loonies who want to attack us will do so no matter how many cameras are over our beds. Now, on the other hand, by attacking non-combatants all over the world, Bush Inc. has converted infinite good will into an implacable wall of resistance, not because of what we are, or the insanity of our enemies, but because of what we have done to people who had nothing to do with the 911 attackers. 2,000-10,000 dead in Iraq: Perle and Wolfowitz refuse to give an accounting. Bush has insulted and alienated the entire world when previously he had them firmly on our side. He's like John Adams wandering into Paris in the 1770's, who insulted and patronized the very people Franklin had so carefully cultivated into supporting the U.S. Adams, like Bush, nearly lost the war by his gross incompentency in diplomacy, his raw moral fanaticism, his ignorance of other nation's cultures, and his blind nationalism.
Soft walls won't save us from Bush's stupidlity in dealing with, well, ANYTHING.
Yeah, white Christians are way better than that!
No way white Christians would ever launch a brutal armed campaign, kill millions of middle easterners, burn their homes and libraries and loot their cultural treasures, thereby setting their society back by thousands of years, all in the name of the Christian God and his holy book! I mean, white Christians wouldn't even think of such a...
Oh, wait...
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Just because the global news media machines haven't reported these things, doesn't mean they haven't happened. Let me put it another way, if these things ever could happen, there's no guarantee that the public would be informed. Odd things happen all the time and people are always a little too willing to accept "official" explanations from sources entangled in conflicts of interest.
The Islamic terrorists don't attack because we treat them like trash (which we really don't). They attack because we aren't muslims. Simple as that.
You could always leave slashdot, there may be better websites for you.
Many people, probably many slashdot readers, understand that most muslims are peace loving and have no interest in killing us. There are people there who hate us, just like you've shown there are people here who hate them. It's usually the ones who know nothing about one another that choose to hate.
But I guess not wanting to commit genocide of a race is anti-American and too liberal for you, so I'll end my post here.
FiGZ.COM - A waste of perfectly good web space
Third of all, how many space shuttle flights have there been in the last 10 years? And how many commercial airplane flights have there been in the last 10 years? How many people are monitoring the Space Shuttle flying? How many people are monitoring the average commercial airplane flying? Don't compare apples and oranges.
Oh and I almost forgot: you mention that the autopilot in Columbia _can_ be disabled. The autopilot mentioned here _cannot_ be disabled. Slight difference. Nothing worth mentioning. Until you need to disable it.
There's no place like 127.0.0.1
OH WELL THEN LET'S KILL THEM ALL! IT'S A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS! GOOD VS EVIL! WE'RE THE GOOD SIDE!
please, got brainwashed? Have you heard of Palestine? Do you remember when Iran was a democracy? Do you know about the dictators we support?
" The Islamic terrorists don't attack because we treat them like trash (which we really don't). They attack because we aren't muslims. Simple as that."
Like most simple ideas about peoples motives, thats almost entirely wrong. There are lots of reasons, one of the primary being the presence of US soldiers in their holy land.
Lebenon was a democracy that we helped destroy as well. With the success rate of american policy in the middle east, I'm amazed they don't just wise up and stop messing around. Americans know nothing about arab civilizations. They shouldn't bother.
If this is true, it must mean that all countries except USA and Israel are muslim, since those are almost exclusively the ones targeted by islamic terrorists.
Do you really believe that?
The reason 9/11 happened in the first place was because pilots and passengers had always been taught to cooperate with terrorists under the assumption that the terrorists will land the plane somewhere and make demands. Once it was shown that hijackers will pilot planes into buildings (an attack unheard even by 'experts'), passengers (starting with the 4th hijacked plane) will gang up on a hijacker and prevent the hijacking from happening. And pilots will do anything to prevent a hijacker from gaining control of the plane.
Two words: circuit breaker. Every avionics system has to have one, or you run the risk of an overloaded circuit causing a fire onboard, with disasterous results. And every circuit breaker must be accessible in-flight, so that they can be reset if necessary, or manually popped if there's smoke but not enough current to pop it normally.
Pull the breaker, bye-bye soft wall.
Technology is not always the answer (ooo, can I say that here?)
This is an absolutely dangerous idea.
The concept of "pilot in command" is extremely important in the FAA's rulebook, and is hard set in aviation culture. It's very simple; one person in the cockpit is the pilot in command (PIC), and he or she is directly, completely, and personally responsible for anything that happens to that plane while it is in the air.
The FAA's rules also clearly state that, in an emergency, the PIC is authorized to do anything necessary to take care of the emergency, even if it breaks every other rule in the book. For instance, if my engine failed and there was no civilian airport in range, I could legally land on a city street or a military airstrip, fly through restricted airspace, override ATC commands, etc.
So what happens if my engine fails, I need to get to an airport on the other side of a major city, and that city is "protected"? Suppose I have just enough altitude to get there at my best glide rate. Will the airplane override my inputs and resist my approach over the city?
What happens if "soft barriers" prevents the pilot from safely responding to a systems malfunction? A lot of flight does occur over dense urban areas (the final approach to Santa Monica airport passes just a few hundred feet over some downtown towers). Who is responsible for the non-optimal response: the pilot in command, or the soft barriers system?
"Oh, but that'll never happen," one might respond. Go to the NTSB's aircraft accident report site and read some reports. Aircraft are complex mechanical devices, and they can and do fail all the time, often in subtle and bizarre ways.
As a pilot, I won't get anywhere near a plane with "soft barriers", even as a passenger.
-John
Keep in mind that the customers of this system are the same pilots who have been fighting tooth-and-nail to be allowed to have pistols in the cockpit. (Many pilots in the U.S. are ex-military, where they learned to fly, and may be predisposed to a certain mindset.) If you tell them that any of their control in the cockpit will be taken away by an automated system, they will cry bl**dy murder!
Good idea, but too strong a lobby against it.
Toon toon! Black and white army!
Besides all the points raised about the risks of a pilot NOT being able to control the plane in an emergency....what about the fact that maybe the terrorists are smarter than to try THE SAME PLOY AGAIN! They used planes because that was our vulnerable spot...but everyone seems to think that terrorists have one strategy. It isn't like fighting a standing army with known technology and tactics which you can counter by thinking ahead. Terrorism is effective because they wait to see where the vulnerability lies and then exploit it. They don't do the same thing twice once you've plugged the gap. Airmarshalls and locked cockpit doors are effective at stopping people from taking over planes and they allow the pilot to remain in control the entire time.
Of course, every system has it's weakness. What if the hijacker threatened to kill, or did kill passengers if the pilot didn't open the door? Do all our pilots have steele reserve?
The best way to fight terrorism is to figure out why people are desparate enough, or mad enough to kill you. Eliminate the reason and you eliminate terrorism--And NO "they hate our freedom" is not the reason. Our freedoms are being eaten away...and anyway, why didn't they attack Japan or England, or France, or Canada? Those places have just as much freedom as we...
I wouldn't be surprised if the next terrorist attack is from a Militia-man going extreme over the Patriot Acts I and II.
"The system would include an on-board database of the GPS coordinates of the no-fly zones."
So, why not bring your own database / replacement-HD with you when you hijack the plane?
What's the ROM do if it detects a harddrive swap in flight? Crash the plane immediately? Make everything a no-fly zone? Land at the nearest airport, lock the doors, and send knock-out gas through the cabin?
Of course, Lik Sang will sell a modchip. You can't have a computer in a plane without a working Linux port available!
Seeing as the trading floor is almost always being filmed for one thing or another, I'd say the chances of a coverup a pretty slim.
Also, if someone did hack into the trading system, what are they going to do? It would be damned hard to route money to places it wasn't intended. So that leaves take the system down altogether. Do you really think something of that magnitude could be covered up?
-phish
soft walls! Hack proof! But wait- there's more! We'll even throw in the world's tiniest bag of peanuts... And if you order now, Boeing will even throw in an extra drink cart with every plane upgraded!
... and no, I am NOT a terrorist, nor do I support actually doing any of these things. I only present them precisely because what one fool can calculate, so can another...
Feh! This has got to be one of the most assinine ideas I've heard yet... Hack proof... yeah right. Do ANY of these nitwits read the Risks list?
Here's some off-the-napkin-back attack methods:
1) "Trusted" mechanic downloads an "upgraded" set of coordinates to the softwall system. Terrorist controlled plane flies right in... It shouldn't be, so no one thinks twice to watch it until it's too late...
2) Terrorists in the general vicinity of the area spoof the GPS signal... It doesn't kick over to VOR, so it must be OK...
3) Just in case they spoof it too well, they spoof the VOR boxes too (remember, they're basically unmanned sheds located in the middle of fields all over the place...)
4) The system is installed, but the fuse is removed? And the indicator light is removed too...
5) Don't fool with the system at all... Just start crashing planes near restricted airspace, and blame it on an inability of the pilot to react to the emergency because the "system" prevented the pilot from doing so... Besides the lawsuits that will end up eating companies and individuals, it will throw so much FUD into the public domain that the systems will be out almost instantly...
6) Don't crash planes - but have pilots report problems with controlling the planes - whether it happens or not... Again, FUD causes the public outcry and the systems are removed...
7)Upload a set of coordinate corrections to the system via whatever "trusted" method there is, and reprogram the system to delay them from taking effect until the plane is at some pre-determined altitude... Once it's there, ALL coordinates become softwalls... Then the plane can't do anything except shutdown...
In short, doing anything that removes control from a pilot is a BAD idea. I'd much rather stick with the threat of being blown out of the sky if one violates a restricted area than trusting a computer to keep me out... Besides, there's always the possibility of EXPLAINING why one is in a restricted area and being escorted by F-16 out of the area if there's a situation that necessitated going in there in the first place (emergency, mechanical/electrical/software failure, etc...)...