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US Government Probes Airplane Vulnerabilities, Says Airline Hack Is 'Only a Matter of Time' (vice.com)
Joseph Cox, writing for Motherboard: U.S. government researchers believe it is only a matter of time before a cybersecurity breach on an airline occurs, according to government documents obtained by Motherboard. The comment was included in a recent presentation talking about efforts to uncover vulnerabilities in widely used commercial aircraft, building on research in which a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) team successfully remotely hacked a Boeing 737.
The documents, which include internal presentations and risk assessments, indicate researchers working on behalf of the DHS may have already conducted another test against an aircraft. They also show what the US government anticipates would happen after an aircraft hack, and how planes still in use have little or no cybersecurity protections in place.
"Potential of catastrophic disaster is inherently greater in an airborne vehicle," a section of a presentation dated this year from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy government research laboratory, reads. Those particular slides are focused on PNNL's findings around aviation cybersecurity. "A matter of time before a cyber security breach on an airline occurs," the document adds.
The documents, which include internal presentations and risk assessments, indicate researchers working on behalf of the DHS may have already conducted another test against an aircraft. They also show what the US government anticipates would happen after an aircraft hack, and how planes still in use have little or no cybersecurity protections in place.
"Potential of catastrophic disaster is inherently greater in an airborne vehicle," a section of a presentation dated this year from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), a Department of Energy government research laboratory, reads. Those particular slides are focused on PNNL's findings around aviation cybersecurity. "A matter of time before a cyber security breach on an airline occurs," the document adds.
Before someone think they're flying a toy drone to accidentally fly a real airplane.
Why the FUCK would a commercial aircraft be connected to the Internet? That seems like an extremely bad idea.
I don't respond to AC's.
Isn't a 737 mostly hydraulic flight controls with manual reversion? Hacking the flight control systems on such an aircraft shouldn't be possible. Same goes for other mostly-manual aircraft like MD-80/90 and the CRJ/Dash 8 series.
True FBW systems should also be air-gapped from anything like in-flight WiFi and entertainment. Ideally running a RTOS with programs stored in ROM that's only updated by either (1) removing a card and installing a new out, or (2) using a serial programmer directly connected to the computer systems.
If they're talking about dispatch systems or something like that being hacked, it will be expensive, annoying, but unlikely to be lethal.
That’s going to happen. But with a whole fleet of planes crashing into buildings around the world.
Of course the US Gov't knows this is possible.. they likely have a cache of aircraft hacks in their back pocket already ready to use on 'bad actors', foreign and domestic.
...https://www.heise.de/imgs/18/1/2/6/3/5/5/9/gross-163291294902e030.jpeg
that's all I read. What's worse is people will actually believe it, as if all the flight controls are available in an outwards-facing interface on the Internet, so anyone who wants to can just start controlling the plane.
First, all pilots are trained to fly the airplane manually, with all air surfaces controlled by hydraulics on most aircraft. Electric motors are also connected to these hydraulics to allow the autopilot to fly the airplane, but as a convenience. Pilots are supposed to know how to fly the airplane without the use of the autopilot and by using radio signals received by VORs (radio-directional beacons) in order to navigate using a paper chart (or an iPad with a chart on it).
That Air France Flight 447 went down was not due to "poor training" or because of a lack of ability to detect a cyber-attack, but because the copilot in that airplane panicked and pulled when he should have pushed. (Frankly his mistake was a rookie mistake that student pilots are supposed to unlearn within the first 20 hours of training.)
Now are there attack vectors which can be used to sabotage an airplane? Absolutely--but they're not the "I plugged the laptop into the network and hacked the airplane's firewall" variety, since most aircraft (certainly the 737) run parallel networks--with the avionics physically disconnected from the entertainment and WiFi systems used by the passengers.
Attack vectors would be for a passenger or someone on the ground to jam and spoof GPS signals, and to jam and spoof directional VOR and ILS transmissions, to fool the navigation equipment on the aircraft to think it's somewhere it's not. Another attack vector is jamming and overriding the air traffic voice and text communications by someone spoofing air traffic control.
The problem is exacerbated by NextGen, where aircraft broadcast their GPS location (rather than their location being detected by ground-based radar), so it makes it harder for Air Traffic Control (who watches all commercial aircraft like a hawk, alerting pilots if they deviate from their flight plan) to determine if someone has gone off course. And of course the problem is made worse by inattentive pilots who often sit around the cockpit bored when they are supposed to be monitoring the navigational equipment to make sure it looks correct. (Remember when two pilots flew off course because both of them fell asleep at the wheel?)
But onboard cyber-attacks? Puh-lease...
The solution to all of this is the solution first taught to student pilots flying their first Cessna 172: fly the damned plane. Left hand on the yoke, right hand on the throttles, both feet on the rudders, and do that stick-and-yoke thing so many of them have forgotten because they think the computer is the best pilot in the cockpit.
If I had my way, the first thing I'd mandate is that all commercial pilots--including those flying the largest A-380 airplanes--spend at least a few hours a month flying the same Cessna 172 they learned in. That way they remain viscerally connected to flying by stick and yoke--and when the computer acts up, as it always seems to do at the worst moment in the cockpit, you can still look out the window, see that piece of cement in the distance, and put the airplane down where it's supposed to go.
This seems like fear mongering, and potentially government agency funding generation. If this is as large of an issue as they think it is, why hasn't it been happening up til now? Government is always behind the curve. This sounds like a solution looking for a problem.
I don't believe in karma, I just call it like I see it.
Obligatory DEFCON Talk
https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-22/dc-22-presentations/Polstra/DEFCON-22-Phil-Polstra-Cyber-hijacking-Airplanes-Truth-or-Fiction-Updated.pdf
I thought this was 23 but it was actually 22. Getting old.
That Air France Flight 447 went down was not due to "poor training" or because of a lack of ability to detect a cyber-attack, but because the copilot in that airplane panicked and pulled when he should have pushed. (Frankly his mistake was a rookie mistake that student pilots are supposed to unlearn within the first 20 hours of training.)
AF447 was a "rookie" problem? No.
From the WTF Wikipedia:
"There were three pilots in the aircrew:[23]
The captain, 58-year-old Marc Dubois (PNF-Pilot Not Flying)[24] had joined Air France (at the time, Air Inter) in February 1988 and had 10,988 flying hours, of which 6,258 were as captain, including 1,700 hours on the Airbus A330; had carried out 16 rotations in the South America sector since he arrived in the A330/A340 division in 2007.
The first officer, co-pilot in left seat, 37-year-old David Robert (PNF-Pilot Not Flying) had joined Air France in July 1998 and had 6,547 flying hours, of which 4,479 hours were on the Airbus A330; had carried out 39 rotations in the South America sector since he arrived in the A330/A340 division in 2002. Robert had graduated from École Nationale de l'Aviation Civile (ENAC), one of the elite Grandes Écoles, and had transitioned from a pilot to a management job at the airline's operations center. He served as a pilot on this flight in order to maintain his flying credentials.[25]
The first officer, co-pilot in right seat, 32-year-old Pierre-Cédric Bonin (PF-Pilot Flying) had joined Air France in October 2003 and had 2,936 flight hours, of which 807 hours were on the Airbus A330; had carried out five rotations in the South America sector since arriving in the A330/A340 division in 2008."
From this, it is certainly not apparent that there were any "rookies" in the cockpit. It is far more likely that as autopilot systems become more sophisticated, and are able to fine-tune the flight performance more closely against the allowable envelope, that there becomes less margin for humans to take over when the autopilot gives up.
While it isn't obvious that some kind network engineer has connected passenger entertainment systems to avionics systems, this could be a real hazard. As you point out, that's not the only attack vector possible.
Your desire for pilots to fly the plane manually is laudable, but planes have become highly sophisticated beasties. Some (many?) aren't particularly aerodynamic without lots of autonomous feedback. Incredible performance is available, but at or beyond the edge of human hand-eye-seat of pants ability. I do not believe that it's possible to stop the rising tide of autonomy and I personally don't think that these flight deck advances are bad "in the long run".
Spoofing the inputs to the flight deck is very doable, requiring computing skill and jamming abilities. Like AF447, where spoofing was unintentional but generated very real flight disturbances, it's a way to upset a metastable condition and create disaster.
If I had my way, the first thing I'd mandate is that all commercial pilots--including those flying the largest A-380 airplanes--spend at least a few hours a month flying the same Cessna 172 they learned in.
How the hell is that different from most company's mandates that pilots require 3 hand flown landings per month? In addition there are things you learn in a single engine that you completely don't need to care about in a turbine aircraft. Not to mention the many many many many examples of pilots who put the plane down in as controlled of a manner of possible when flying a disabled bird, that I don't think your statement is even warranted. Also in larger planes you typically have a dedicated FMS, not the glass cockpit you would have in your 182. That FMS is no different than the ECU of your car. It is most probably running on a 68k Motorola processor which has the ability to be dumped and reflashed. Maybe it's not as simple as plugging into the onboard wifi and hijacking autopilot, but it's not too far fetched for a mechanic to JTAG the flight computer and plant a manipulated firmware.
Especially when you take some time to think about MH370 and 9/11
Someone in Trump's cabinet, and/or Trump himself, just happens to know of a company that sells a solution for every one of those problems! And Trump and/or this cabinet official also happens to have financial ties to this company, but that's just a happy coincidence.
>Now are there attack vectors which can be used to sabotage an airplane? Absolutely--but they're not the "I plugged the laptop into the network and hacked the airplane's firewall" variety, since most aircraft (certainly the 737) run parallel networks--with the avionics physically disconnected from the entertainment and WiFi systems used by the passengers.
Article mentioned specifically that Airbus and Boeing admitted that the passenger wifi shared the same data bus as the flight controls (throttles, ailerons, rudder, etc). Presumably to save weight.
I did not say the pilots were rookies. I said the copilot made a rookie mistake:
I notice you didn't quote the relevant part of the Wikipedia article:
Rookie mistake. (1) You always clearly announce who is in control of the aircraft. Generally this is announced by one pilot saying "my controls", and the other responding "your controls." Two pilots trying to do the opposite action is rookie mistake number 1.
(1) When the aircraft is in a stall, it's because insufficient air is flowing over the wing, and the wing cannot provide lift. This is solved by pushing the nose down, allowing the aircraft to regain airspeed. Bonin, the co-pilot, was pulling the stick back, which can only be read as that he panicked, and forgot training he should have learned while learning how to recover from stalls waaaaaay back when he first started learning to fly and got his basic pilots certificate. The pilot pulling when he should push is rookie mistake number 2.
On top of all of this, your assertion:
Are you asserting flying is too hard for humans? Because that would worry the fuck out of me. Or are you asserting flying commercial jets is hard? Because there I'd completely agree with you; the most complex thing I've flown is a single-prop high-performance retractible out of a Class C airport in IFR, and the idea of flying a jet is intimidating as hell. But then, that's why the guys who fly commercial jets get additional training: to learn how to keep ahead of these highly sophisticated beasties.
The solution to all of this is the solution first taught to student pilots flying their first Cessna 172: fly the damned plane. Left hand on the yoke, right hand on the throttles, both feet on the rudders, and do that stick-and-yoke thing so many of them have forgotten because they think the computer is the best pilot in the cockpit.
If I had my way, the first thing I'd mandate is that all commercial pilots--including those flying the largest A-380 airplanes--spend at least a few hours a month flying the same Cessna 172 they learned in. That way they remain viscerally connected to flying by stick and yoke--and when the computer acts up, as it always seems to do at the worst moment in the cockpit, you can still look out the window, see that piece of cement in the distance, and put the airplane down where it's supposed to go.
Great points, and when in the 172 (or Cherokee) cover up the instruments and let them do some real flying. The problem with all the advanced avionics (or instrumentation in many industries) is we put to much faith in the instruments and have lot that fingerspitzengefuehl that tells us something is not quite right and we need to do something. Information overload can be an issue as well as we bombard pilots or operators with a lot of data they then try to process, as well as how the data is presented. It's not just aviation, TMI for example was caused by operators relying on faulty information and thus not properly diagnosing a minor problem that resulted in an much less desirable outcome.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
The point of my recommendation is to connect the pilot back to all of the stick and rudder skills, including proficiency in handling stalls as well as smooth stick and rudder operations. The corporate landing mandate can be handled by taking over on the final approach, but I want the guy to be able to hand fly the airplane and demonstrate proficiency in stick and rudder skill (including shit you don't want to do with passengers, such as side slips and power-on and power-off stalls).
Remember, the guy who managed to put down the Gimli Glider (Air Canada Flight 143) happened to also be an experienced glider pilot, so by accident he happened to be in the right place at the right time.
I don't like luck.
He said a rookie mistake, not a rookie pilot. Even the most experienced pilot in the world can still make a rookie mistake, given the right circumstances. Pulling back on the stick when the plane is stalling certainly counts as an error a rookie would make.
W3Woody,
All good points as GPS is such a weak signal it does offer lots of opportunity for mischief. There is also the risk of someone with physical access reprogramming the avionics - think cleaning crew. Change one byte on a scaling coefficient on a fuel calculation then 1000 miles from land you are suddenly running on fumes. There are also multiple RF data links to the ground, but most of them are relatively low band width. Of course there is the whole electronic flight bag used to replace maps, that are basically just PCs and ripe to get hacked - don't connect to the plane, but still pilots base many decisions on them. The Internet connection everyone thinks about in the pax cabin is air-gaped from the avionics except for a one-way serial connection feeding nav data from the avionics to the IFE (In Flight Entertainment) to display the you are here map.
I'm going to hack into the plane's system, and have the PA system play "Never gonna give you up" on repeat for the entire remainder of the flight.
Is it airlines, or airplanes, or both?
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
was a hack
All you have to do is read the news to see that. And people give me shit for paying cash for things (reduce exposure to payment system data breaches as much as possible) and why I refuse to own a smartphone (your kitchen collander has fewer holes) or have IoT devices, or have anything to do with social media sites.
Pulling back when you should put the nose down a bit is a rookie mistake. But that said, what no one, ever, has ever convinvingly sold me on is an explanation as to WHY ON GOD'S GREEN EARTH did this aircrew on AF 447 drive the airplane, nose-high in a a a stall, all the way from cruise (they were above 30,000) to the sea the whole time.
I understand that on the airbus the stall horn shuts up when they had the nose hard up and would sound again if they pushed the nose down, but for fuck's sake, .... I just fail to comprehend that one crash. Makes no sense to me.
It's more than a rookie mistake. And cue the Airbus apologists: I think there's something borked in their philosophy. Now, I'm not an airline pilot so I'll shut the fuck up now, but.. I just don't understand this one wreck. PUT THE BLOODY NOSE DOWN! You had 30,000 ft to do it....
The "Civilized World" jumped the shark ca. 1973.
It was somewhat less obvious than that, though you are right that there was a fundamental problem with who owned the controls.
In a normal case, the stall warning they were getting wouldn't have been "real" -- that is, the plane normally would've automatically adjusted to ensure that they didn't actually stall it no matter how they pulled. The problem was that due to certain conditions, they were under "alternate law" and therefore the stall warning was real and they should properly have descended to gain airspeed and regain lift.
Attack vectors would be for a passenger or someone on the ground to jam and spoof GPS signals,
This can be done from a laptop on a plane, too, fwiw.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Thousands of unsecured IP cameras world wide belie your claims.
That Air France Flight 447 went down was not due to "poor training" or because of a lack of ability to detect a cyber-attack, but because the copilot in that airplane panicked and pulled when he should have pushed. (Frankly his mistake was a rookie mistake that student pilots are supposed to unlearn within the first 20 hours of training.)
This is a gross oversimplification of what happened. A US pilot and airline safety expert wrote a book on the crash and his conclusion was that the junior co-pilot in charge of the plane reacted exactly as he was trained but there were issues with the training. It's a really complex situation regarding the crash. The pilot would almost certainly not have made the mistake that crashed the plane but he got 1 hour of sleep the night before and took his break early due to being tired. Inexplicably he put the most junior of the 2 co-pilots in charge. There''s been some thought that the senior of the 2 co-pilots would have safely flown through the storm had he been placed in charge. Also, the faulty air speed indicators weren't replaced in Brazil, where I have no doubts that a competent replacement could have been done, because Air France wanted the plane flown to France to do the work there because the French are control freaks to the n-th degree and they don't trust anybody else to do technical work.
The crash was due to an amazing set of circumstances where EVERY decision made in a long chain of events was wrong starting with some instrument setting failures before the plane even took off. This all enabled the plane to get into alternate law mode, which neither of the 2 co-pilots realized in time had happened. The plane crashed because in alternate law mode the plane allows the pilot to do anything, including things that could crash the plane, and junior co-pilot put the plane into a stall due to failure of his training to account for the situation he actually found himself in. His thinking got screwed up and he pulled up on the stick to try to climb, which actually put the plane into a stall that nobody noticed. There were also some design issues with how Airbus designed the plane's control sticks and audio warnings and the 2 co-pilots failed to fully understand that the Airbus design decisions were odd and had to be accounted for.
they think the computer is the best pilot in the cockpit
Well, the ones who think that are, most likely, correct.
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
Well, of course it was a gross oversimplification; I summed up a chain of events and circumstances and training and inputs and actions that can trace their roots back minutes, and even hours, back before the actual crash took place, into two pithy sentences.
But at the bottom of the stack, the airplane hit the water in a nose-up stall, having held the nose-up stall for several minutes as the plane descended from 30,000 feet to sea level. The plane hit the water in a nose-up stall because the co-pilot was pulling up on the yoke--countermanding the inputs from the pilot, without indicating who was in charge of the airplane. And the airplane maintained a nose-up stall through several minutes because the co-pilot was putting the wrong inputs on the controls, in almost complete contradiction to all the training he received--since there are no slow-speed aircraft attitudes where recovery is achieved by pulling the nose up. Zero. None. The only time you pull the yoke back to recover the aircraft is either (a) if you have an indication that you are going too fast, or (b) you're panicked and are trying to gain altitude. If you have the yoke up and the altimeter is unwinding, the hardest god damned thing in the world to do is the thing that will save your life, the thing the pilot of that aircraft was trying to do but the thing the co-pilot refused to try, is to push the nose down.
Now how we got to here--that's important. And probably more important than the co-pilot making a rookie mistake--because if we stop with "the co-pilot is an idiot", rather than trying to determine if there is something more we can do to assure greater safety in commercial flight, we've basically thrown up our hands and said "sometimes people die."
And that is unacceptable.
(Frankly, by the way, I wish more organizations or corporations thought like the FAA--which, when faced with pilot error, tries to understand why there was pilot error. They try to figure out if it was information overload or improper inputs or inattentiveness or improper training. They try to figure out how we can make flying safe, even with imperfect pilots and imperfect equipment.)
Now, I had a CFI who once told me that the people he hated the most to give checkrides to were commercial pilots. Because none of these guys have really had to do any real stick-and-rudder work since they first started working for the large commercial airlines. One of the scariest thing he's ever done is to give a particular older pilot--retiring from the airlines and who bought his own little 4 seater prop airplane to continue to tool around in the air--a quick refresher in stalls. Because this guy seemed hell bent on doing exactly the wrong thing when the airplane started to buffet in that prelude to a stall, once nearly putting the aircraft into a fatal spin because he simply didn't know how to use the rudder.
It's why my wish is for all commercial pilots to spend some time each month in a Cessna 172, practicing things like power-on and power-off stalls.
Because I honestly and sincerely think if that co-pilot had recent experience with stalls, rather than (as is typical for a lot of those bus drivers) not having done stall work or rudder work for perhaps a decade or more, the 216 people who died aboard Air France 447 would be alive today.
On an airbus plane in normal law they are trained that the airplane will not allow them to stall and they can pull back all they like. So when the pilot sees indications that the plane is descending he pulls back, expecting the airplane to do whatever it needs to maintain controlled flight and eventually climb.
The problem is that when you lose normal law and go into direct law the airplane doesn't have the stall protections so you have to remember to push forward until you get the airspeed.
The fundamental problem is that because of all the protections built in Airbus airplanes pilots fly the plane differently when in normal law vs when things go bad and they go into direct law.
Flying in direct law is a 1X10^-9 probability event so when it does happen noone is ready for it.
Youre arguing with an idiot. You will lose just because he's too fucking stupid to learn.
Remember: The Galactica was the only battlestar (Pegasus aside) that survived the Cylon attack because it wasn't networked. Lesson to be learned? :)
keeping or growing their budgets.
(1) DHS knows NOTHING about the inner working of avionics... but they DO know that if they can panic the congress by making the public nervous then SHAZAM! more money for DHS!!!
(2) The article depends on two deceptions: First, that all avIation electronics are loosley termed "avionics" but that puts in-flight entertainment systems (which may well be hackable) into the same big basket with flight deck systems (which are most-decidedly NOT hackable). Second, it says "US Government probes..." but there are vast areas of the government that have NO CLUE about how aircraft work, just as huge parts of the government have no clue about ships, or crops, or stock markets, etc.
The parts of the government that are actually involved in aviation (FAA, NTSB, NASA, etc) are not wasting time on this because they know that the FAA severely regulates flight deck avionics and oversees the code in those systems rather severely. People involved in the development of these systems know how nuts and paranoid the FAA regulators are on this front - the very sorts of interfaces and code that would have to be in place in order to be vulnerable enough to allow these these systems to be hackable would never get approved in the first place. No path to hack == no hack.
Now, back to the in-flight entertainment system "avionics"... hack away! Make all the claims you want that you "hacked the avionics on a plane". Be as misleading and dishonest to the public as you like. Who the hell cares given that there's NO connection to the flight systems.
Sorry, but I despise the industrial-grade deception in sensational articles like this one... and yes, I HAVE worked on flight deck avionics systems.
Yes, fire the assholes spreading spin so they can get a pile of money to do something. For the other a-holes who said this report - blah blah - cybermen/cybernaughts panic - sky will fall in as well - drama queens. A title like '
We have established it is not flight control, so you are safe - nothing life threatening.
If it was, and there was no instant fixes sent out NOW - I would be amazed.
Even laptops and phones -do not count - because the same could happen at the airport terminal. Maybe they can hack sensor protocols - hey Bob, one of the nosewheels is low on air. Or take off weight -which could be trouble -if the pilot had no brains. Or SMS the pilot to turn squawk box to hijacked for 2 seconds as DHS is conducting a test. That is not hacking, but phishing.
One suspects any successful attack must occur before takeoff, such as emailing the pilot new flight plans, such as a route change to avoid storms/ice but actually drive the bus into trouble. but that is not hacking the plane. Hacking the hosties PDA that you got a free upgrade to First, is also risky.
One thinks the report was commissioned by a telco so they could gain financial advantage by selling approved safe systems.
The flaw in this report is the hacker would need to be onboard, or at the airport, and DHS, armed with smart frequency counters will 100% catch the troublemaker to will then rot in jail forever after. Texting 'Catering' so revise the pilots meal is also ineffective, such as ham sandwiches and oysters - and all phones are tracked - so scratch that.
However the SNL clip of two drunk pilots ordering one more for the road, then posting that footage online - certainly upsets passengers.
That is not hacking, but false news with entertainment value.
Hacking the inflight entertainment system - ok that is inconvient.
Nope, you misunderstood the explanation for the crews reactions.
Firstly, the aircraft was in a data mismatch situation - it couldn't trust the information it was being given by external sensors, so it hands control back to the crew who have a standard check list for such a situation.
What the crew should have done was ride throttle and stick, increasing throttle with a slightly nose up attitude until the sensors became trustworthy again.
What they did was pull back on the stick and slow the aircraft down, giving it very little forward velocity but significant downward velocity - this just confuses matters even more with regard to data.
During all this, the sensors became trustworthy again, but the aircraft was now in a situation where the crew simply didn't believe the data they were being give, even though it was correct.
Below a certain forward velocity and high angle of attack, stall warnings on all aircraft cease to sound because it's an insane situation which should never happen - by pushing down on the stick, the crew were actually activating the stall warnings by increasing the airspeed back past the minimum threshold for it sounding, but they were convinced that they were actually achieving the opposite, slowing the aircraft down so the airspeed dropped to the upper threshold for the warning. So they kept the nose up, and induced an aerodynamic stall - exactly what they thought they were avoiding.
The angle of the airflow over the wings was at more than 35 degrees, which is far beyond that needed for an aerodynamic stall.
The same year that AF447 crashed due to an airspeed data mismatch, there were over 100 other incidents on Airbus aircraft of the same thing - but only AF447 crashed. All the other crews had no issues with the Airbus approach.
And Airbuses rate of airspeed errors in this area are almost identical to Boeings year on year - if the crew properly follow their training, it's a non-issue. In whatever aircraft you are flying.
The data mismatch situation only lasted a minute, but the crew ignored the instruments from the point of autopilot disconnect until impact.
It's worth noting that the Captain, Marc Dubois, *did* realise what was wrong when Bonin told him "I've been at maximum nose up for a while", but at that point the aircraft was seconds away from impact, and Dubois had only been back in the cockpit for a minute or so - Dubois is heard on the voice recorder saying "no, don't climb!"
The two co-pilots lost situational awareness and failed to follow guidelines.
Actually, it has been explained properly: The co-pilots were both utter fucktards who had gone out to a nightclub, drinking alcohol and smoking weed, so their mental state was not the one required for proper high function in a crisis, as shown by the fact that they didn't even try to circumvent the storm. The captain had sleep issues and had gone to take a nap, and came to the cockpit mid-situation, with the two fucktards at the controls.
I have a similar level experience though probably less hours than you. To me the biggest concern is what you first mentioned, spoofing the GPS and the VOR system. Without that the only remaining system is the inertial navigation and I would be inclined to think that the inertial navigation would have failed if I was reading a discrepancy between GPS, VOR, and INS. The INS isn't exactly the most reliable system. The only way I can think to fix this would be to rely on some kind of celestial navigation system. Even that has its flaws with ultra high altitude weather systems being able to block the visible portion of light required. While I don't think it's overly likely or common modern airliners are certainly susceptible to spoofing and I don't expect pilots to not use the autopilot system because that's something that reduces accidents overall and allows the pilots to be rested so that they can use their skills during the more critical phases of flight. Asking a pilot to hand fly for 8 to 12 hours straight is just asking for trouble and I don't believe it will increase the safety of any flight considering they would be taking in the same navigation inputs that an autopilot would. The only solution to prevent external interference is more sensors with more external data to allow filtering for false or spoofed inputs.
Flight Control Computers have autopilot functions, which are connected to GPS receivers. It is not hard to overpower GPS signals. Now if you can inject malware in the GPS data structure, you already have a foothold inside the aircraft. From that your hacking can proceed.
That works from 100km distance of the a/c.
At least in my definition. In any serious war/conflict zone you can expect GPS to be jammed and spoofed. Has happened in Korea, Syria and in the Donbass. Commercial spoofers exist for testing navigation devices. All you need for airspace action is to add a 1KW amplifier. That must be expected and should never badly threaten an aircraft. Backup navaids such as dead reckoning, inertial and radio beacons should be usable.
see flight 370
On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
All you mention does not protect you from a human attacker exploiting a software bug or a logic design bug.
Having said that, I have not yet seen any evidence of an exploitable bug in safety critical aerospace software. What we have seen is software cock-ups caused by aircraft manufacturers (e.g. the A400M crash or lots of people killed by V22 software).
A properly designed electronic/software-controlled system can be more reliable than most mechanical systems of equal function. That is because solid design and redundancy can reduce failure rates to almost arbitrarily low rates.
Your ABS brake already demonstrates this every single day you use it. Unlike horses, it is never tired or agitated.
Also, no non-electronic system can offer the safety functions ABS can offer. That can be said for many electronic control systems. That's a very serious factor in the safety calculus.
Most importantly, mechanical systems have non-zero failure rates. Wear, tear, corrosion, aging, icing, humidity takes its toll.
"Article mentioned specifically that Airbus and Boeing admitted that the passenger wifi shared the same data bus as the flight controls"
Can you please provide a precise quote and URL ? Until you do that, I call BS. This makes no sense both in terms of bandwidth and security. Control signals are in the range of less than 1Mbit, while 100s of people surfing the net and watching videos requires much larger data rates.
A mechanic sabotaging a plane is not a "cyber attack". It is good old sabotage and can only be prevented by background checking and proper training. By proper airport security. Not the least by a competent intelligence service which is able to conduct effective background checks.
You can think of 10000 ways to dangerously mess with an aircraft if you are a hostile mechanic. 100 of these are attacks on software which you can physically alter by accessing CPU or EPROM pins.
...what you say is true.
What I know is that medical devices are under FDA regulation, which is onerous. But these regulations do not yet require advanced cyber attack defences (such as code correctness proofs for data packet parsers etc). The folks who develop medical device software have a "I do not care" attitude to cyber security. For them, this is the problem of the hospital network, not theirs.
IP cameras are built to be controlled remotely over LAN or internet. Airplanes are not.
For those in avionics software industry, how quickly can you turn around a small security patch while still adhering to DO-178B, level D or lower?
I'm going to guess 6 months at a minimum to develop and QA the patch. Rolling it out to the fleet, maybe another 6-12mo.
It's not the WiFi or Internet connected things. The issue is the stuff that uses basic radio signals without any encryption, authentication, ... most of these things can be accessed using basic SDR and are vulnerable to simple replay attacks. Remember most planes in the air are fromany 70s 80s and 90s. These things need to be looked at urgently!
Thanks for projecting you still live w/ your momma SOYBoy https://it.slashdot.org/commen... & proving you're really a SOYBoy (above & beyond that link, lmao) once again!
CLUE: I don't answer to my parents (like you, lmao).
* See everyone? THAT is what SOY does to a once male brain, lol - it makes it stupid (like yours CLEARLY has evidenced itself to be).
APK
P.S.=> I can see you now, "QuAkiNg" in your effete EFFEMINATE 'RaGe' going for a SYRING FULL of SOYMilk (drinking it doesn't do it for your kind anymore - no, not even SMOKING shredded plastic bisphenol A milk cartons (hahaha) - no, you're FULL-BLOWN SoyAddicts now on the needle, RoTfLmAo (like Bruce Willis in LOOPER (you're all "Loopy" it fits & you prove it in the link above) Year 6 to 23, hahahaha!)... apk
Cessna 172? WTF for? Maybe for one year. Have them BFR in a glider. A Cub the next time. Switch out to an RV with nothing but steam gauges, or maybe a Rutan design, and then any of the LSAs. An airline should be able to afford a fleet of small planes that take away all the electronic goodies and force the pilot to be more than a systems control engineer.
Then, put him BACK in the simulator and force him to prove that he can be a systems control engineer.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
'Cause Cessna 172's are as common as fleas on a dog. Though any single prop manually controlled aircraft that one would train in (Pipers Archers, DA-20's, whatever) will do in a pinch: anything where you can feel the bite of the air on the yoke and feel the pitch of the aircraft on the rudder.
CmdrTaco is not here, he left for youtube months ago.
The FAA will not let anybody put avionics on the flight deck of any non-"experimental" aircraft (a category that does not imply an "X plane" and does not include aircraft that haul paying passengers) unless their people have reviewed every damned line of source code.
I won't go too deeply into it here, but the regulators are seemingly paranoid about microprocessors to such an extent that I think they wish we were all still using tube-based electronics - personally believe that their extreme regulatory paranoia is actually an impediment to safety. They've even convinced themselves that unused memory must be flooded with certain values - argued the point with a guy once who was utterly convinced that if the processor became upset by radiation at altitude and jumped to a random location in unused address space having a particular value there would be safer than another value (the micro involved was as likely to accidentally jump to the spot before or after and produce WORSE results in one case with his solution but he was the regulator and newfangled micors with multi-byte instructions seemed to radical and dangerous to him). They not only want to see every line of code, but insist on seeing how it maps to the binary executables and they will not certify a system that contains any unused code (code that might be used in another model of the instrument, or might provide optional features, etc).
I'm sure that there are some younger FAA folks now who are more comfortable with microprocessors than a few years back, but I believe the overall paranoid mindset is likely still quite severe (mostly a good thing for the flying public but a total pain in the butt for developers). For a taste of the situation, try getting a look at the RTCA DO-178 regulations and do not even imagine that those are all that have to be satisfied. There's simply NO F***ING WAY a hackable hardware interface to the flight deck is gonna get onto a plane, and NO F***ING WAY that code with memory leaks, buffer overrun vulnerabilities, file path parsing recklessness, or anything else that provides a vulnerability will be on a flight deck. Anybody who claims the opposite has no clue.
Test complet
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.