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FBI Alleges Security Researcher Tampered With a Plane's Flight Control Systems
Salo2112 writes with a followup to a story from April in which a security researcher was pulled off a plane by FBI agents seemingly over a tweet referencing a security weakness in one of the plane's systems. At the time, the FBI insisted he had actually tampered with core systems on an earlier flight, and now we have details. The FBI's search warrant application (PDF) alleges that the researcher, Chris Roberts, not only hacked the in-flight entertainment system, but also accessed the Thrust Management Computer and issued a climb command. "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. He also stated that he used Vortex software after comprising/exploiting or ‘hacking’ the airplane’s networks. He used the software to monitor traffic from the cockpit system." Roberts says the FBI has presented his statements out of their proper context.
Somehow I doubt this actually happened. While I can believe that in theory it might be possible. I just dont see this guy, a security researcher from what I understand has a great reputation would have done this.
More likely the government is trying to save face right now. and since the TSA cant seem to catch any real terrorists, might as well make an example out of someone instead.
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
No researcher would be so reckless as to actually screw with an airplane's engines mid-flight. The fact that the FBI alleges that he did means that they know damn well they have nothing to do on, but need to paint this guy as a terrorist in order to save themselves looking like idiots for arresting a guy based on a single twitter message.
-1 disagree is not a modifier for a reason. -1 troll, flaimbait, redundant, overrated are NOT acceptable substitutes.
This guy might be a giant dick who tried to crash a plane, and if that's the case we should hold him accountable like any other person who endangers others.
But isn't the real problem here that, if what the FBI describes is true (which I doubt), the FAA allowed -- and is still, today, allowing -- a plane to fly with a passenger entrainment system that can access flight controls? The power train CAN bus in my car has better isolation and security than that.
Of course, if it were possible to take control of a plane like this, the government would immediately ground all those planes until the security flaw could be fixed, right? Funny, haven't heard that they've done that.
Do not under any circumstance EVER talk to law enforcement. It's that simple stupid. I don't care if the cop threatens to tow your car and take your children. STFU. If they have something on you they will do it anyway and if they don't then they're trying to get you to say something for which they can arrest you. Nothing you say will ever help you in a court of law. Law enforcement are TRAINED TO LIE in order to get the responses they're after. "Sir- I'll need to ask you to step out of your car so I can search it". He's not ordering you to step out of your car. He's asking permission to search your car. If you comply he'll testify in court you gave permission for them to search your car. The exact phrasing will never be heard in court as the cop will just summarize it as "I asked for permission to search he responded yes". Had you STFU and only surrendered your name and address and if driving your ID, insurance, and registration you would never have ended up arrested. Yes- cops will "get angry" if you don't "cooperate". They will threaten to arrest you. However these are generally lies to get you to do what they want (allow a search, etc). If you don't "cooperate" they won't actually arrest you 99% of the time because they haven't got anything on you.
As I professional pilot can I say that while I have no insight into what may or may not actually have happened on this flight, the write-up in the article is utter bollocks from a flight dynamics perspective. If the case really rests on such a flimsy explanation of what happened than the FBI need some above from somebody who knows anything whatsoever about aircraft and flight dynamics.
Did he use Excel to land the aircraft?
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
It's sad when the FBI makes a statement and I automatically don't believe them.
The FBI asks him to describe what he was able to accomplish in his theoretical lab. He does, they cut and paste it into the affidavit leaving out the part that it was in a simulated environment. You should never believe what's in an affidavit, it's designed to get a warrant, or get a DA to prosecute, not to be truthful.
There's no way that entertainment/wifi/anything-accessible-to-a-passenger could in anyway be connected to those critical systems...is there?
There should be no tie between the control and entertainment networks. I would be surprised if there aren't regulations that forbid it. My guess is this simulated system was not like the real ones. It certainly isn't clear what really was done.
If there is no tie between the entertainment and nav systems, then it becomes difficult to explain the seatback display of the current flight information. At some point the data has to move from one system to the other. That takes a lot more than "no tie".
John
He said if he was an attacker he could "access the control computer, ... issue a climb command..." etc.. FBI has just taken those quotes out of context to justify its warrant.
In this case he was dumb and was reporting what he thought was a vulnerability to the FBI, and explaining the possible attack scenarios, and the FBI have thought "great! finally we can justify our terrorism budget!" and arrested him.
As to whether there is a cat5e ethernet port that connects to the flight computer under a passenger seat. Why would there be such a thing? The only network there is the inflight entertainment system and those systems have no physical route to the flight controls.
The guy actually said he had never truly tampered with flight control systems EXCEPT in simulator settings. So, no, he never hacked into real planes.
"I decided I could write something better than everything out there in two weeks. And I was right." - Linus Torvalds
I work in the industry and have a decent understanding of these systems as I write software for them. In-flight entertainment systems ARE wired to critical systems but typically through buses that do not allow bidirection communication. in-flight entertainment systems require input from critical systems so they can know the city pair for route based content as well as other aircaft data for driving the moving map among other things. (altitude, heading, ground speed, lat, lon, etc, etc.) This data is typically read over ARINC 429 buses which are multi-drop buses where there is one source and multiple consumers. Sources include LRUs such as the FMC (Flight Management Computer), IRS (Inertial Reference System), CMC (Central Maintenence Computer), ADC (Air Data Computer), and sometimes ACARS or CIDS which are somewhat different as they do support some bidirectional communication.
I could be wrong about the viability of being able to get to aircraft controls from the IFE system as I'm more an expert with the in-flight entertainment side than the aircraft side. (The expectation has always been that the aircraft is supposed to protect itself from the in-flight entertainment system.) Regardless, I don't believe it is true that it is possible to achieve what has been claimed.
What if the protection on planes is so bad that a passenger can use the inflight entertainment system to gain virtual access to the controls of the plane?
Suppose you are a security researcher and find this out. What do you do? Tell boeing! They... do nothing. Tell the airline! They.... do nothing.
It all starts with a belief issue. You hack into the entertainment system, compromise the firewall and see plane-control messages flying around on the network you now have gained access to. This is enough for a sufficiently technical person to be convinced of having gotten too far for comfort. At that point you know you are only one step away from taking control of the airplane.
Tell anybody less technical about it and they will not be convinced that you'd be able to move the plane. For example, today with this news today someone already voiced: "he might only THINK he moved the plane" (... while in fact the pilots initiated that maneuver).
So... to prove to the world that there indeed is a dangerous situation, you need to actually make the plane move.
And this is where everybody gets their panties in a knot. Suddenly the guy who reports that the planes are not secure enough is the bad guy and needs to be thrown in jail.
Examples of people reporting security problems and being ignored include: On a saturday night two men walking their dogs notice that the bank has left a window open. A person can just climb into.. the bank! So monday morning they walk into the bank, tell them about it, bank says thank you and... nothing happens. Next weekend, window is again left open. So they tell the bank again. And again. After a few times, to prove the point, they decide to climb in, and photograph what access they have once inside the bank. They got into a lot of trouble for that. But since then, the window has been closed.
Personally I have reported security problems in computers without going that extra mile of "making the plane move". In one instance I've reported such a misconfiguration to over 100 system administrators. Two hours later, saturday afternoon, the first response: "Thanks, fixed". Come monday morning, one response: "we know, not a security issue, get lost.". And all others were "no response". A year later more than 50% of the computers where I reported the configuration error were still vulnerable.
With laws being written in such a way that the "white hats" (*) can be thrown in jail, we create an environment where the white hats are either ignored or thrown in jail. Before you know it, the "white hats" are too afraid to report anything and stop reporting real problems. In that situation, you only find out the problems when a bad guy ends up crashing a plane.
Boeing: invite the guy over to show you the problem. Once that hole has been closed, invite him over, pay his hotel an meals for a week while he hacks at a "fixed" plane on the ground at your facilities. Credit him for making aviation safer.
(Do this, before someone makes it stick that: "Boeing created this system with such bad security that it put passengers at risk.").
(*) the researchers that report the problems they find without causing real harm,
It's not even possible in theory. There are several reasons for that.
1. The routing of data is hardcoded into the switches and cannot be changed without physically accessing the switch. The routing table not only determines which devices may talk to which devices, but also the direction of the data flow. This means that a monitor device cannot talk to an engine because the monitor is configured only to receive data.
2. But even if they managed to get the monitor device to send data, the switch would recognize this as a device malfunction (because it's not allowed to send) and disable the port it's sending on. This is not due to security against hacking but more due to "a malfunctioning device should not be able to DOS the plane's network".
3. There are actually two networks, sending identical data for redundancy. Now guess what happens if one of the networks sends different data than the other? Right: The offending port / device gets shut down.
4. The network protocol is a modified UDP protocol (no need for TCP) which makes the network deterministic - data delivery is guaranteed within a certain timeframe. Which means, again, that you need specialized hardware to even talk to the network.
5. And even if you managed to take down both switches, there'd still be a manual override in the cockpit which allowed the pilot to steer the plane without the network.
In essence, you need pretty hefty physical access to modify the planes flight mechanics. Something you will not achieve while the plane is in the air and even very unlikely while the plane is on the ground.