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Collecting Private Flight Data On the World Economic Forum Attendees With RTL-SDR (qz.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Every year politicians and business men meet at the World Economic Forum in the small mountain town of Davos, Switzerland to discuss various topics and create business deals. This year Quartz, an online newspaper/magazine sent a journalist to the forum tasked with writing a unconventional story about the forum: he was asked to monitor the private helicopter traffic coming in and out of Davos from transponder broadcast of ADS-B data. Using an $20 RTL-SDR dongle, Raspberry Pi and ADS-B collinear antenna they monitored the flights over Davos. From the data they were able to determine the flight paths that many helicopters took, the types of helicopters used and the most popular flight times.
This is what Flightradar24 uses. A little more expensive box, but no big deal.
And any executive person should be aware of this and not attend major events like the World Economic Forum in their private aircraft but instead travel incognito. Use Business Class and make sure that the clothing is not standing out. If you have a security team - make them look like a mix of tourists, business men and airport service personnel. (Who actually cares about the person pushing the airport wheelchair around?)
As soon as you have a helicopter you are standing out as a VIP like a polar bear in a kindergarten.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
I'm guessing that once the story is widely known there'll be calls to arrest him, even though he's using publicly available data and equipment and not doing anything wrong.
Who else read the title as "We brought an antenna to Davros"?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
Normally I'm the first to complain about this but everything was explained in the links.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I feel the same way about all the fucking cellphone acronyms. And when you add the pseudo-technobable of marketing drones on top of it, it's nearly impossible to know what's what.
To be more specific, it's not illegal to listen to the 800mhz cellular freqs. All the FCC could do was stop the commercial sale of new equipment that was able to hit those freqs. Got pre-ban equipment, listen away. Make your own, congrats!
I thought I had read that many of them were already outraged and many had taken the step of registering their planes with shell LLCs so that existing flight trackers and tail watchers couldn't decode who was on the plane.
If they look it up, all they get it something bogus like "AirplaneHoldings23, LLC, a Delaware Corporation, Proxy Manager, John Smith, Esq."
It's the same gambit the super rich do for high dollar real estate so that the transactions and ownership are completely opaque.
It's an air traffic control signal. The point of it is to tell air traffic control 'Aircraft flying over here! Here's my identification, altitude, heading and exact location. Please don't hit me.' Without the ability to decode that information all air traffic control gets is the rough position off of radar. So no, it's not going to be encrypted. It's possible a future version will introduce authentication, but only as a measure to prevent saboteurs jamming up air traffic control by spoofing planes that don't exist or making them appear somewhere other than their real location.
Laser targeting aircraft in a non-wartime scenario is not going to go over well.
You do realize they still use unencrypted AM radios to communicate right? And why bother encrypting when you would have to give everyone the key? They broadcast ADS-B for safety as even today over 100 years from the first flight planes are still pretty dangerous. If you don't give a shit about safety go ahead turn your transponders off. Why not shut off the TCAS too for good measure? Planes flew for years without any of that new fangled not crash tech and while they won't immediately fall out of the sky if you switched it off they would definitely crash into each other more often.
Its like those people that encrypt their wifi with WPA2-PSK AES and put the password in the wifi name: "WIFI KEY DEADBEEF"
If you have to give the same key to everyone why even bother? It provides no security. Because if you know the wifi key you can decrypt the traffic of everyone else using the AP. So then you have a false sense of security which is much worse than knowing the connection is not secure.
Kind of like how the TSA is supposed to make you feel safe without actually making you safe but worse.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
I can seen the airport of my nation's capital from my balcony. I have a similar setup logging the position reports to a PostGIS DB, which allows some interesting queries ("Give me all the position reports found beneath a certain altitude within a certain polygon that describes a runway, sorted by airframe and timestamp") which allows you to determine what planes landed and took off.
Looking up who owns the aircraft can be done online, and it's funny when something owned by a holding company in the Caymans flies in. Now if only there was an online API that allowed one to query the visitors list for the legislative bodies, one could tie the data together, along with the record of votes cast, and jump to some intriguing conclusions.
That ban needs repealing. Analog AMPS hasn't been used in forever, so that spectrum is no longer used for what they originally enacted the ban for. The digital replacement is/should be encrypted, so no ban is needed.
Tiller's Rule: Never use a word in written form that you've only heard and never read. You will end up looking foolish.
Well, part of the gambit is because the flight information is public - when you file a flight plan, that information is public. As well, your plane's registration is also public information, so you can take any plane's registration and lookup information about it.
All the super rich have done was hide their names behind proxies so as to not make their information public on these databases.
Of course, I suppose it's possible to manually tag who's on what plane despite hiding the registration.
This is slashdot, nobody clicks the links.
Top Tips:
Become invisible to police officers by sticking your hands in your pockets and looking up at the sky while whistling.
GZ0275 HMP Broadmoor.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Or you could just shoot one down. The answer will be on CNN within half an hour or so.
BRB, door.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
I'm sorry, but who gives a shit? ADS-B is totally public info broadcast over an open standard and available to anyone with an antenna. The software is bog-standard and all this has been doable for at least 10 years. It's so bog-standard there's a large community doing this on a routine basis for more than 2 years (and that's only one example).
Of course, before that you could tune to the local ATC frequency (it's just an AM radio) and listen to position reports.
Next this guy will be listening to the local cab dispatch frequency and telling us he can find people who have called for a ride.
I have developed a truly marvelous proof of this comment, which this signature is too narrow to contain.
And that's pretty bad too — can't wait for some journalist to exploit that hole, so it gets plugged as well. With today's communications gear a properly encrypted point-to-point channel is perfectly possible in most places, where aircraft are regularly flying — and AM radio can still be used as a backup on the rest of the planet.
A point-to-point communication that needs to be heard by every pilot in the area? That's not point-to-point, that's broadcast, and every receiver would need the decryption key. Where's the security, again?
Heck, using the pilot's cellular phone would be a better choice, even without hardening of the device.
Better choice for what? Reducing situational awareness for everyone in the air and creating a headache as pilots have to dial a ten digit or more phone number to get to ATC instead of dialing in a five digit frequency (which in modern cockpits is part of the glass and can be entered just by pointing at the airport and pushing a button.)
Not all of the broadcasted information needs to be broadcasted at all, and some of what does need to be, can be modified to make tracking impossible or, at least, much harder.
At a MINIMUM, the position, heading, speed, altitude, and aircraft type need to be broadcast, which is because the goal of the ADSB system is to allow everyone to track other aircraft. To prevent falsing, the id is also required. (Two aircraft come close enough their targets merge, then two aircraft reappear. Which one is which? You cannot control what you don't know.) The GOAL of ADSB is to allow tracking, so thinking you can cut out information that allows tracking is, well, nonsense.
I don't, so let's not bother with that strawman...
Uhh, yeah, since everyone in the air needs to know the information, you do need to give the keys to everyone.
Except that only the ATC system really 'needs' this information, you and I do not (granted it is still fun to use/see)
As a pilot, I certainly do need to see that information. ADSB data is an extension of the "see and avoid" concept, where the pilot has a responsibility for situational awareness and is the ultimate controller of his aircraft.
It's nice when ATC issues traffic advisories, but is required to do so only for IFR traffic. VFR traffic can ask for "flight following", but that service is "workload permitting" for the controller, and VFR traffic without flight following get NO traffic advisories except the ADSB data (or TAS in some airspaces.)
Given the decade+ rollout that the US based system is to take, it's pretty unlikely that midway through they will turn around and say "on second thought, you need to upgrade to this even newer standard in order to be compliant"
The general aviation fleet and suppliers are so far behind the curve on meeting the 2020 deadline that it would be impossible for FAA to suddenly change the technical specifications for ADSB. There are so many aircraft owners and operators who are waiting for the suppliers to come up with reasonable solutions (especially for ADSB-out) that it may wind up being impossible to meet the existing deadline with existing standards anyway. Just the number of aircraft that will require avionics work will mean that the backlog will extend past the deadline.
Except this is completely irrelevant.
It is FEDERAL LAW. Of course it is not irrelevant. Why do you think you are now allowed to use personal electronic devices while inflight but still not allowed to use cell phones? Because it is the law, not a myth.
Fortunately, I don't need to.
You don't need to understand what ADS-B is designed to do before you yammer on and on about how it should be encrypted point-to-point? Yes, the needs of aviation are different than the needs of computer scientists. They don't fit into a one-to-one "Alice sends a message to Bob" scenarios.
Big deal — the ATC towers can act as Certificate Authorities issuing keys to all planes.
You clearly do not understand the needs of aviation or how it operates. Please stop making stupid statements like this. ATC makes use of ADS-B data, they don't generate it. For the vast majority of their flights, most aircraft are not dealing with towers, at least not when flying outside the east coast area, and certainly not even then when they are in the enroute airspace. Your 'tower' is irrelevant until it comes time to take off or land.
Then, whoever is interested in my details, can establish an encrypted connection with me and ask me nicely.
And if I'm out of range of 'your tower' and you can't hear my request? The authority of 'your tower' extends, for the vast majority of cases, about 5 miles from your airport. I'm six miles away and need to know if any of your depatures are going to be in my vicinity. But I can't because I'm not talking to 'your tower' and can't ask "pretty please" let me have public data.
You don't need to know, who they are to avoid crashing into them. This much I understand.
You understand nothing. ATC needs to know who is who because they have to control them if they are on an IFR flight plan. Here's just a simple scenario to demonstrate the problem. A is flying IFR along a specified airway. B is VFR on a different one. The targets merge over the VOR where those two routes intersect. (Targets merging is a big no-no to ATC, but ATC has called A, told him about B, and A reports "traffic in sight". It is now A's responsibility to keep from running into B.) B turns to follow the airway departing the VOR that A was supposed to turn onto, but A missed the turn and is heading off the wrong way. ATC sees an unidentified ADS-B target departing the VOR that looks like A, and it is doing what A is supposed to do. All is well. ATC doesn't care about B, B is VFR and hasn't asked for flight following. ATC has no responsibility for, or even any way of communicating with, B.
Time passes. B turns off the airway. Oops, thinks ATC, A is making a mistake. ATC calls A. A has flown out of range of that ATC facility. ATC can't contact B to find out it is B, so is B actually A with a radio failure? All of this is solved by having the identification of the aircraft sent with the ADS-B data. (And, of course, pilots will know that the identification WILL be sent using the standard transponder -- A will have a discrete 4096 code and B will be sqwaking 1200. But identifying aircraft isn't necessary you say, so we will assume that they are unidentified.)
The pilots need to know where they are, what speed they are going, what altitude they are at, just so they can know where they are and predict conflicts. The pilots need to know what model and identity they are so they can be sure that they've identified the correct target when they do make visual contact. They need to know if they are looking for a United 747 or a Delta 727 or just a Cessna 182. This information is important for situational awareness. Yes, today, they have to rely on ATC traffic advisories to tell them "traffic 12 o'clock, opposite direction, a United 747", but the VFR people not talking to ATC deserve that same information.
And why would I be bothered by it, un