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Calling Out a GAO Report That Says In-Flight Wi-Fi Lets Hackers Access Avionics
An anonymous reader writes A new report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) warns that in-flight W-Fi, including wireless entertainment and internet-based cockpit communications, may allow hackers to gain remote access to avionics systems and take over navigation. At the same time, a cyber expert and pilot called the report "deceiving" and said that "To imply that because IP is used for in-flight WiFi and also on the avionics networks means that you can automatically take over the avionics network makes about as much sense as saying you can take over the jet engines because they breathe air like the passengers and there is no air gap between passengers who touch the plane and the engines which are attached to the plane."
This story is just a slashvertisement.
The story linked (now linked in the summary) is to a guy making silly ignorant statements about how the GAO is wrong but in such a vague way that I can safely say the guy making these silly comments is wrong. He's arrogantly implying that no aircraft can be hacked because they never make any mistakes and use separate systems and a special software device (thats not a firewall!) that acts as a firewall and doesn't let the two connected networks communicate with each other ...
Also he seems to think that engines 'breath' air, and that the air inside the cabin of an airliner is not at all isolated from the air that goes into the engines.
In short, the summary refers to an article written by someone that claims to be a security expert AND pilot while at the same time making incredibly stupidly inaccurate blanket statements that any useful security officer and certainly any pilot know are too broad and vague to be true or just flat out wrong.
There most certainly IS a firewall between the passengers and the engines on commercial jet aircraft, otherwise the people would die at 30k feet. The fact that he claims to be a pilot and then claims there is no separation between the cabin and exterior is just scary.
And claiming that this other special box ... that acts as a firewall ... but since they gave it another name, its not actually a firewall, so therefor its not possible to be hacked and bypassed.
The reality of it is, what the GAO said IS TRUE. IT IS possible that 'hackers' MIGHT be able to cross the network boundaries if they are physically connected, anyone who claims this is not true knows absolutely nothing about IT security or security on complex systems in general. You work really hard to prevent it, and make certain design decisions to make it hard to cross that gap, but the instant they are connected, you've created the possibility. You can't honestly claim that your network is 100% secure and impeneratble which is what this guy is trying to claim ... about aircraft that he's never had anything to do with, never seen, knows nothing about the internal operation of ... just because he's a pilot doesn't make him suddenly privy to private information internal to Airbus or Boeing.
Once again, I repeat, this is nothing but a shitty slashvertisement. They probably paid timothy to post it to the front page, which explains why it was done in such a hurry the first time and didn't even have a fucking link in it.
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As someone who has spent a great deal of his career in avionics design, both civilian and military, I fully agree.
Avionics computers are not PCs running linux or windows. They don't have generic user level applications. They are custom designed, custom built hardware with very specifically chosen components to do the specific job at hand. The application software is pretty much entirely custom. As far as operating systems, many still run home grown schedulers that provide a bare minimum of services. Only in the last 15 years or so have they even started using off the shelf operating systems and so forth. Even then, it's usually something like VxWorks or Green Hills Integrity or some other RTOS like that. But they have to use versions of the operating systems that conform to ARINC 653. And while ethernet has started appearing on modern systems, it's use is highly specialized. They may put an IP stack on the box to facilitate getting packets from one box to another but the content of the packets are very highly specialized and they are carefully scrutinized before they are accepted and acted upon. Not to prevent hacking but to prevent "undefined behavior". Safety requirements mandate that they carefully inspect packets coming in and drop out of spec packets according to the rules established long before the first line of code got written. Not because they're trying to prevent hacking. It's because accepting unexpected and out-of-spec data can lead to problems that make the plane hit the ground. The anti-hacking capabilities are a side effect of that scrutiny.
But even if you could get your packets into these specialized computers, how do you think you're going to hijack the box and spawn your malicious task that takes over? Like I said before, these computers aren't just PCs running Linux. They're custom built computers with an RTOS that very carefully and very deliberately partition the box to prevent tasks from corrupting each other or the operating system. And each task very specifically inspects every packet coming in before using the data so things like buffer overruns and what not simply won't work. So crafting the right kind of packet to allow you to insert your malicious code is more difficult by many orders of magnitude. Beyond that, you are extraordinarily unlikely to find a random port being open that gives you access to the OS core. That's a safety issue so it's checked before the computer can get FAA certification. The only ports available to be used are the ones that are needed and specified.
Is it 100% provable that you can't hack into the systems? No. But it's so monumentally unlikely as to be effectively impossible. Are there some systems out there that had vulnerable code make it through certification? More than likely. But even so, the threshold for making it through FAA certification is high enough that even bad code that slips through is far less vulnerable than most everything out on the commercial market.