That trust was what led to this incident where someone just walked into the airplane dressed as a maintainence worker and nobody stopped him.
Also pilot suicide isn't something new and the aviation world has tried to come up with several regulations to ensure it doesn't happen even though we completely trust pilots on a normalative basis.
I mean yeah that's why we cannot just "trust". And yes, in that case, there was nothing that could be done but its a case of mental illness and we can look into how regulations and airlines handle mental health issues in pilots. There are regulations for this across all airlines, they failed in this case. So yes, at that moment in time, there is nothing you can do if the other pilot freaking turns off the engine as you begin to climb but there is absolutely things you can do to the best of your ability to ensure such a person shouldn't be allowed to fly / be in that situation in the first person.
I shared the link to the entire article so not sure how I left that out. And yes, there was a hole in the airport fence but he got so far because people trust these workers but that can be abused. And in that case (sky king), the guy was actually a maintainence worker who stole the plane. So just saying its okay to be vulnerable just because we trust all actors around the vulnerability, especially when its as easy as a freaking hole to abuse that trust is not a strong argument. RIP Sky King.
Are these the same maintenance workers that have access to even more sensitive parts of the airplane like the avionics compartment and its miles of wiring?
Wait until they find out your mechanic has unfettered access to your car's OBD port when you hand them the keys. They could install a COIN SIZED device on the CAN bus and you'd never know.
Some people do this voluntarily in exchange for a discount on their insurance.
There's literally millions of people driving newfangled EVs where the car manufacturer has full remote access to their vehicle and can upload software however and whenever they like.
I forgot only the nefarious ones wear yellow reflective vests and earmuffs.
There's literally millions of people driving newfangled EVs where the car manufacturer has full remote access to their vehicle and can upload software however and whenever they like.
This part has been beyond baffling to me. The last thing I want, is to hit the brakes in my car, and suddenly they're less/more sensitive, due to an update the night before, and it really does matter especially on snow/ice. And such updates happen.
I also don't want a perfectly good, 100% working car to suddenly degrade in experience because "Wups! Sorry! Last update broke <whatever>, we'll update within the month to fix!". It's just pure, unbridled dumb.
I recently bought a car, and the dealer tried to sell me an extended warranty. What? It's under a full warranty right now, and yes, my region has very strong warranty and anti-lemon laws. But my point is, they kept saying "there's a lot of complex and expensive electronics in this car, you're going to need an extended warranty".
Um, what? Hello? You just explained that the car breaks down a lot because it's complex? So complex that there are more frequent, highly expensive issues?
How is that a plus?
If a car is "too complex" to roll out the assembly line, without needing updates to modules on a monthly basis for years, it's the opposite of positive. I've had multiple BCM(body control module) updates, updates to every single module in the car. There shouldn't be enough code to cause issues here, it should be simple, simple, simple.
But it's not.
It's complex and difficult to make bug free.
And that makes me oh so very comfortable as I drive down the road.
Last time I bought a car the dealer couldn't enable the Internet features because I said my phone was broken. He looked at me puzzled but I said I could buy the car some other day if that was a problem...
A dealer will never let a buying customer leave, so 3 years later my car still can't connect to the Internet.
> This part has been beyond baffling to me. The last thing I want
Most people don't think about it when buying a car, or they have no practical way to evaluate it. So it is one of these things you probably need to fix with legislation, except the legislators love the idea too because sensor-rich, always-online cars give them more tools to police the society.
I don't really know what to do with that, short of going neo-Luddite. People often see the excesses of ad tech as a failure of capitalism, but in a sense, we're seeing a tech-driven failure mode for free, democratic societies. In a world where your online presence is tied to your identity and always under the watchful eye of a large language model, and where you can't move from A to B without leaving a digital trail, it's not gonna be fun if you become a thorn in the government's side.
> less than a minute, that hardware implant can be fitted into a port accessible via a hatch on the exterior of the plane
Just as with computers, as the saying goes, if you have physical access to the device then all bets are off. The tricky part is getting that physical access in the first place...
Of course. Doesn’t mean we should leave the root password written down on a post-it next to the hardware. It sounds strange that such a privileged port has no authentication.
Getting security to work reliably in such scenarios can be hard. And your customer really don't want their up to hundred million in cost pieces of equipment sit there doing nothing because maintenance is unable to do something with it.
Much simpler just to instruct to physically secure the conduit around... Even better if that is already approved and demanded process.
It is not that simple, atleast in the automotive industry _today_. Atleast here in EU.
Every component is analyzed from a cyber security perspective. Many components needs tampering protection - while others need not. This includes replacing components with malicious ones.
It is not logical at all and a stupid regulation. But it is not as simple as you can do what you want if you have physical access.
Well, the EU, being very much dictated by Germany, who have a large car industry, has a vested interest in making sure that if people want to have a better car they pay for a better one new rather than upgrade with an aftermarket chip.
A better car for most people is not just a chip upgrade. Anyone with a lick of sense has no need for more horsepower than whatever a standard EV has. It's beyond plenty for normal driving. I drive an Opel Corsa E which is a cheap EV and it accelerates more than fast enough. Upgrading would be about better safety equipment, better range, more space, better seats, better sound system and stuff like that. None of that can be done with a chip. It would be a different car, which is what I plan to get in a few years.
Paying for a horsepower upgrade chip is something very few people have any interest in doing. Mostly irresponsible assholes who are a danger to others, maybe a few people who need it to pull trailers or something.
I started my career proper as a junior network engineer for a regional British airline (British Midland, since subsumed by BA) in 2001, just before 9/11 continuing for 3 years until mid 2004. Throughout that time, I held an airside pass at LHR that allowed me to get pretty much anywhere I liked, apart from the taxiways and runways of course.
This was pretty standard for most staff - once you’re airside, there were not many restrictions about getting down under the ramp or anywhere around an aircraft on a stand.
Never was this illustrated better than the final homecoming of a BA Concorde in late 2003, when a whole load of staff from different roles across the airport all piled out onto the edge of the apron to wave it home.
A junior IT bod in a high-vis touching something on the outside of an aircraft ? Wouldn’t stand out to anyone watching a CCTV feed. Maybe the other ramp staff would notice, but if you timed it right…
What I’m trying to say is that physical access to aeroplanes even at a place like LHR was pretty much open to anyone who holds an airside pass.
> The question is more - how hard is it to get airside without a pass?
Depends. Did you fly in with a random unlocked Cessna from a remote field?
Really funny when you see a random rural airport with an unattended gate with a sign on it telling you the code is "SQUAWK VFR" and you just look at the crusty keypad and slap 1200 in like everyone else before you did on the rubbed-off 1, 2, and 0 keys.
It’s crazy how much trust there was prior 9/11. I’m wondering if it’s the same nowadays if you get to a certain position or if everything is perfectly compartmentalised
Tangential story. I used to work for one of Australia's 'Big 4' banks. One night I was working in one of the 2 'tier 1' DCs. The place was chock-full of ancient kit. Old mainframes. Tape drives. Nothing in a locked cabinet: this was a room from the 1960s, still active in 2007. I remember it being very beige.
It occurred to me that the catastrophe I could have caused simply by ripping out as many cables as I could see would have been … if not a mini-recession, certainly the sort of thing that moved markets.
Yeah yeah, redundancy and backups. I knew the infrastructure. It wouldn't have worked, not for weeks anyway.
To be in said room, I had undergone a cursory police check.
> the company may not in fact implement any such update to their systems for years to come, given how rarely commercial airplanes are redesigned.
Boeing commercial airplanes are constantly updated. As long as the airplane is in service, Boeing retains a team of engineers that update parts as needed. If FAA review is needed, this will of course take longer.
BTW, anyone with access to the internals of an airplane could potentially sabotage it. Sadly, all people with access need to undergo a security check.
HN should have a rule like what does some reddit subs do.
Either outright ban paywalled articles, or if not then either an archived link should be posted alongside, or the whole text of the article should be copy pasted as a comment
No, we just expect them not to be posted on link aggregators like HN. Because they are useless links for 99% of readers.
Did you know that video game piracy enhances video game sales? That's because if someone pirates a game and likes it, they might buy it, recommend it to friends, or buy the next one.
That's false. I have a 20-odd year old newspaper in a drawer, and it contains so much more news about the world than today's paper. Even national politics is only covered when it's click-bait worthy. Economy? Just a little bit. Foreign politics? Perhaps in a neighboring country when there's an election or something; otherwise, forget it. But its science, art and human interest sections are still comparable. Those don't feed democracy, though.
There used to be journalists in every town or city working for local newspapers back when ad revenue stayed local. Don’t confuse the success of a handful of top journals with the health of the field.
> In 1990 we had one daily news(paper) journalist for every 4,490 Americans. Now (or 2019 to be exact), we have one such reporter per 14,250.
Paying for individual publications you like is fine.
Paying for all the publications that get articles on the HN front page would be very expensive. Only a minority of people reading HN would have subscribed to any one publication. The result is that paywalled articles can only be properly discussed by a minority people. It also encourages discussion of the headline instead of the article.
Google, serving adds to the article reader? Adds are annoying, but we’re free to leave if we don’t like how a website is managed.
I personally loves the way HN pages are served as they are loading very fast even on not-high end devices, and volunteers contributes to the content (comments).
Paywall are annoying and there’s always someone that post an archive link to circumvent it but I’m not sure about the ethic of a rule requiring to do so.
...so they built an equivalent of OBDII reader for planes, and it worked just the same as ones for cars? Interesting but not as scary as the title may suggest.
“researchers aren't revealing which port they targeted on the 737, nor are they releasing some details of how their hacking device is able to spoof commands to the plane's computers”
Bro. You put “429 interceptor” on the PCB. You’re just fucking on the ARINC 429 bus.
There's already a dongle on the market hooked in some 737s that gives you WiFi access to the 429 and 717 busses through the same port...
EDIT (again): Oh come on, the paper says they went into the Open Maintenance Connector through the E&E bay through the nose gear. C'moooon.
Double-triple edit: Also - ARINC 429 is kinda fun. You can do things like take old glass cockpit hardware and work it into your flight simulator by just feeding the cockpit hardware simulated 429 messages over the wire from your flight sim.
> “Our technical experts are confident that the layers of protection in place on the airplane, including within the system design and the operating environment, provide sufficient mitigation to significantly limit the feasibility and risk of real-world attacks,” the statement reads.
You already trust them (as well as the pilots) every time with your flight.
That trust was what led to this incident where someone just walked into the airplane dressed as a maintainence worker and nobody stopped him.
Also pilot suicide isn't something new and the aviation world has tried to come up with several regulations to ensure it doesn't happen even though we completely trust pilots on a normalative basis.
As AI171 has shown, turning the engines off on rotation does it reliably and there’s nothing that the other pilot or regulations can do to prevent it.
Airfields are expected to be secure areas. If you can walk through a hole in a fence there's issues.
Remember a guy stole an entire airplane a few years ago (RIP Sky King). Airplanes don't have ignition keys.
Wait until they find out your mechanic has unfettered access to your car's OBD port when you hand them the keys. They could install a COIN SIZED device on the CAN bus and you'd never know.
Some people do this voluntarily in exchange for a discount on their insurance.
There's literally millions of people driving newfangled EVs where the car manufacturer has full remote access to their vehicle and can upload software however and whenever they like.
I forgot only the nefarious ones wear yellow reflective vests and earmuffs.
This part has been beyond baffling to me. The last thing I want, is to hit the brakes in my car, and suddenly they're less/more sensitive, due to an update the night before, and it really does matter especially on snow/ice. And such updates happen.
I also don't want a perfectly good, 100% working car to suddenly degrade in experience because "Wups! Sorry! Last update broke <whatever>, we'll update within the month to fix!". It's just pure, unbridled dumb.
I recently bought a car, and the dealer tried to sell me an extended warranty. What? It's under a full warranty right now, and yes, my region has very strong warranty and anti-lemon laws. But my point is, they kept saying "there's a lot of complex and expensive electronics in this car, you're going to need an extended warranty".
Um, what? Hello? You just explained that the car breaks down a lot because it's complex? So complex that there are more frequent, highly expensive issues?
How is that a plus?
If a car is "too complex" to roll out the assembly line, without needing updates to modules on a monthly basis for years, it's the opposite of positive. I've had multiple BCM(body control module) updates, updates to every single module in the car. There shouldn't be enough code to cause issues here, it should be simple, simple, simple.
But it's not.
It's complex and difficult to make bug free.
And that makes me oh so very comfortable as I drive down the road.
A dealer will never let a buying customer leave, so 3 years later my car still can't connect to the Internet.
Most people don't think about it when buying a car, or they have no practical way to evaluate it. So it is one of these things you probably need to fix with legislation, except the legislators love the idea too because sensor-rich, always-online cars give them more tools to police the society.
I don't really know what to do with that, short of going neo-Luddite. People often see the excesses of ad tech as a failure of capitalism, but in a sense, we're seeing a tech-driven failure mode for free, democratic societies. In a world where your online presence is tied to your identity and always under the watchful eye of a large language model, and where you can't move from A to B without leaving a digital trail, it's not gonna be fun if you become a thorn in the government's side.
Just as with computers, as the saying goes, if you have physical access to the device then all bets are off. The tricky part is getting that physical access in the first place...
Much simpler just to instruct to physically secure the conduit around... Even better if that is already approved and demanded process.
This is far less true than it used to be, though, and it seems reasonable to expect that aircraft become as secure as Macs.
Every component is analyzed from a cyber security perspective. Many components needs tampering protection - while others need not. This includes replacing components with malicious ones.
It is not logical at all and a stupid regulation. But it is not as simple as you can do what you want if you have physical access.
The above statement sounded way more edgy than intended lol
Paying for a horsepower upgrade chip is something very few people have any interest in doing. Mostly irresponsible assholes who are a danger to others, maybe a few people who need it to pull trailers or something.
This was pretty standard for most staff - once you’re airside, there were not many restrictions about getting down under the ramp or anywhere around an aircraft on a stand.
Never was this illustrated better than the final homecoming of a BA Concorde in late 2003, when a whole load of staff from different roles across the airport all piled out onto the edge of the apron to wave it home.
A junior IT bod in a high-vis touching something on the outside of an aircraft ? Wouldn’t stand out to anyone watching a CCTV feed. Maybe the other ramp staff would notice, but if you timed it right…
What I’m trying to say is that physical access to aeroplanes even at a place like LHR was pretty much open to anyone who holds an airside pass.
The question is more - how hard is it to get airside without a pass?
I once went in through the main arrivals exit doors at Heathrow. I'd forgotten something so I went in, got it, came out again.
It was a stupid thing to do, but I wasn't arrested, stopped, or anythinged.
This was before 9/11 so I doubt you could do it today. But even so.
Depends. Did you fly in with a random unlocked Cessna from a remote field?
Really funny when you see a random rural airport with an unattended gate with a sign on it telling you the code is "SQUAWK VFR" and you just look at the crusty keypad and slap 1200 in like everyone else before you did on the rubbed-off 1, 2, and 0 keys.
It occurred to me that the catastrophe I could have caused simply by ripping out as many cables as I could see would have been … if not a mini-recession, certainly the sort of thing that moved markets.
Yeah yeah, redundancy and backups. I knew the infrastructure. It wouldn't have worked, not for weeks anyway.
To be in said room, I had undergone a cursory police check.
Boeing commercial airplanes are constantly updated. As long as the airplane is in service, Boeing retains a team of engineers that update parts as needed. If FAA review is needed, this will of course take longer.
BTW, anyone with access to the internals of an airplane could potentially sabotage it. Sadly, all people with access need to undergo a security check.
HN should have a rule like what does some reddit subs do.
Either outright ban paywalled articles, or if not then either an archived link should be posted alongside, or the whole text of the article should be copy pasted as a comment
It's akin somewhat to the open-source crowd demanding features (and security updates) all without donating to the project.
Did you know that video game piracy enhances video game sales? That's because if someone pirates a game and likes it, they might buy it, recommend it to friends, or buy the next one.
You are putting words in my mouth I've never said. I don't "expect in-depth articles", HN would be perfectly fine without paywalled content.
At every level of quality, there is more journalism than there was before.
> In 1990 we had one daily news(paper) journalist for every 4,490 Americans. Now (or 2019 to be exact), we have one such reporter per 14,250.
https://www.reportforamerica.org/2021/06/28/the-journalist-p...
Paying for all the publications that get articles on the HN front page would be very expensive. Only a minority of people reading HN would have subscribed to any one publication. The result is that paywalled articles can only be properly discussed by a minority people. It also encourages discussion of the headline instead of the article.
I personally loves the way HN pages are served as they are loading very fast even on not-high end devices, and volunteers contributes to the content (comments).
Paywall are annoying and there’s always someone that post an archive link to circumvent it but I’m not sure about the ethic of a rule requiring to do so.
Bro. You put “429 interceptor” on the PCB. You’re just fucking on the ARINC 429 bus.
Also, this exists as a commercial product (in some ways): https://www.astronics.com/wireless-electronic-flight-bags-we...
There's already a dongle on the market hooked in some 737s that gives you WiFi access to the 429 and 717 busses through the same port...
EDIT (again): Oh come on, the paper says they went into the Open Maintenance Connector through the E&E bay through the nose gear. C'moooon.
Double-triple edit: Also - ARINC 429 is kinda fun. You can do things like take old glass cockpit hardware and work it into your flight simulator by just feeding the cockpit hardware simulated 429 messages over the wire from your flight sim.
Here's some 737 instruments being driven from FSX: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RtTJiU-vArs
So "We don't expect hackers to figure it out"
People