"When you see a good move, look for a better one."
The most important thing I've learned over the years about being a software engineer is not to rush off and implement the first solution that pops into my head. Often, the hacker mentality is just to crank out a sufficient solution, so that you can pop your stack and get back to whatever it was you were trying to do in the first place. But as an engineer the best thing you can do in that situation is STOP and THINK. Don't let yourself write a line of code until you've had time to fall out of love with your original idea. If your first solution turns out to have been the best one, so be it; you've just wasted an hour. But it's far more likely that the improved solution you get as a result of the investment of that hour will pay your back 10- or 100-fold down the road.
I wonder what is to stop someone from cracking the communications protocol and effectivly hijacking the plane.
This situation sounds like a canonical use for a one time pad. Before the plane takes you generate sufficiently many gigabytes (or terabytes, or whatever) of randomness, put one copy on the plane, and keep one copy on the ground. Then whenever you want to communicate with the plane you xor your outgoing message with the (next unused section of) the stream of random bytes. When the plane gets the encoded message, it xors it with its copy of the random bytes (again at the appropriate offset), which results in the original message. Provided your random numbers are truly random, this results in a virtually unbreakable code.
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"When you see a good move, look for a better one."
The most important thing I've learned over the years about being a software engineer is not to rush off and implement the first solution that pops into my head. Often, the hacker mentality is just to crank out a sufficient solution, so that you can pop your stack and get back to whatever it was you were trying to do in the first place. But as an engineer the best thing you can do in that situation is STOP and THINK. Don't let yourself write a line of code until you've had time to fall out of love with your original idea. If your first solution turns out to have been the best one, so be it; you've just wasted an hour. But it's far more likely that the improved solution you get as a result of the investment of that hour will pay your back 10- or 100-fold down the road.
I wonder what is to stop someone from cracking the communications protocol and effectivly hijacking the plane.
This situation sounds like a canonical use for a one time pad. Before the plane takes you generate sufficiently many gigabytes (or terabytes, or whatever) of randomness, put one copy on the plane, and keep one copy on the ground. Then whenever you want to communicate with the plane you xor your outgoing message with the (next unused section of) the stream of random bytes. When the plane gets the encoded message, it xors it with its copy of the random bytes (again at the appropriate offset), which results in the original message. Provided your random numbers are truly random, this results in a virtually unbreakable code.