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Hacker Holds Key To Free Flights
mask.of.sanity writes: "A security researcher says he has developed a method to score free flights across Europe by generating fake boarding passes designed for Apple's Passbook app. The 18-year-old computer science undergrad didn't reveal the 'bypass' which gets the holder of the fraudulent ticket past the last scanner and onto the jetway; he's saving that for his talk at Hack in the Box in Amsterdam next month."
... how do you deal with the inevitable "Hey, you're in my seat" dilemma?
s/[stupid comments]/[intelligent discourse]/gi
You might get lucky and get an empty seat. Hint - pick a center seat in the last few rows, these seats suck. However, if you fly into the US or many other countries, they will have received a passenger manifest electronically from the airline. You'll have fun when you get to customs and there's no record of you...
Whoa, talk about floating yourself relative to your original position! If the flight is full can I just sit aligned in the center?
First rule of Flight Club is..
You do not talk about FLIGHT CLUB.
Second rule is..
You do not talk about FLIGHT CLUB.
Seat maps are now available online realtime for most major airlines. So there is no need to guess - you can pick a right flight and an empty seat, do it right before the departure and it will likely remain empty.
On the other hand, my impression of gate check was that it checks boarding pass against database record of name/reservation/seat assignment. Certainly any other information maintained by gate agents is in the same remote database (such that any changes they perform at the gate become instantly visible online, for example standby and upgrade list status). So, no matter what the "local hack" is, it would only work if either:
- He can also hack remote passenger database (unlikely)
- Specific airline does not check passengers against the database and trusts properly constructed boarding pass (also unlikely, at least in US, as there needs to be positive match between passenger and loaded luggage that has to be performed based on that darn remote record).
There is also pesky passenger manifest with names, which again comes not from your boarding pass but from the remote system (though they need to reconcile with with reality).
Let's wait and see. Perhaps some of these conditions don't hold in Europe for whatever reason?
Lately, when I checkin for a flight, the software in the ticket scanner checks to see if the seat has already been scanned. If it has, it'll beep, if not then it marks it as now allocated.
The gate agents also have access to electronic versions of the passenger manifest, and newer systems even display the names of passengers that are not yet checked in/on board/awaiting seat assignment next to a seatmap of the aircraft so they can be literally dragged and dropped to assign seats. If the boarding pass fails to scan, the first thing the gate agent will notice, either by looking at the list or manually typing in the passengers name, is that no one with that name is booked on the flight, either as a paying passenger or on standby. The name would have to match up with a person assigned to the flight, otherwise they will not let you on.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
For hackers with balls, try that on Air Force One.
"Hey, Mr. President, this is my seat!"
All the CKI system i know of, count the pax boarded against the pax list in the CKI system. If they find a discrepancy, they check the one in addition and ask to check the ticket. Good luck making your explaining.
The bottom line was that the secure (relatively) thing is not the boarding pass but the ticket. Now if you could free ticket i would be downright impressed. Free boarding pass have long been known to be insecure. They are not there to be secure but to count boarded pax on the system against real boarded on plane, to be able to remove the one which are No-Show and remove their baggage.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org
"He said the model used in all EU airports to check the validity of tickets was "malfunctioning" noting they lacked "direct access to the airliner database", but wouldn't be drawn on whether he tested his research by boarding a flight."
To that I have to say only "yeah , right" as in very sarcastic. Some airline in europe have spearheaded the interline and ground handling electronic exchange between TKT and CKI systems (using edifact messages TKCREQ, TKCUAC, TKCRES) since.... 2001. Even the medium airline are using the itnerline access. only very very small airline are still using offline process like ETL list.
That "security" researcher never checked in real life its results.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0345409469/
visit randi.org