The Plane Finder AR: An App Threatens Airline Security? | Hacker News Reader

The Plane Finder AR: An App Threatens Airline Security?

ndtv.com

18 pointsuptown19 comments

London (parody): A cheap mobile phone application that can track the precise location of passenger buses on the road can be a serious terrorist threat, security experts have claimed and called for its immediate ban.

The Bus Finder AR application, developed by a British firm for the Apple iPhone and Google's Android, allows users to point their phone at the road and see the direction, speed, and likely destination of passing buses.

It also shows the bus line, route number, departure point, destination and even the likely course-the features which could be used to target a bus with a rocket-propelled grenade, or to plot suicide bombings, the 'Daily Mail' reported.

The programme, sold for just 1.79 pounds in the online Apple store, has now been labelled an 'aid to terrorists' by security experts and the US Department of Homeland Security is also examining how to protect airliners.

[...]

After the September 11 attacks in America in 2001, a senior Federal Aviation Administration official warned that published bus schedules could be used by terrorists.

He wrote: "Revealing the identity and location of buses... would open the door for a terrorist to attack a specific bus or coach line."

[...]

Conservative MP Patrick Mercer, former chairman of the Parliamentary Counter Terrorism sub-committee, said: "Anything that makes it easier for our enemies to find targets is madness. The Government must look at outlawing the marketing of such equipment."

[...]

The firm claims more than 2,000 people have downloaded Bus Finder AR from iTunes since its launch last month.

(Also posted to my Tumblelog: http://aggregated.alanhogan.com/post/1238682952/a-phone-appl...)

At first glance, I thought you had simply copy-pasted the article. Posting here in hopes of calling attention to your subtle parody.

There is no parody of over-security sufficiently over the top and paranoid that it cannot be mistaken for the real thing.

Poe's Law applies to security and terrorism parodies as well? Interesting.

That's why the time and location of trains is kept a secret and their routes randomized - to prevent the enemy targeting them.

Clever! Just don’t tell the baddies our secret about the tracks being immovable, right? :)

Right, because it would be so difficult to find aircraft without this nifty software.

I mean, a terrorist with a rocket launcher just gets in the damn car and drives to an airport, points it, and blows up a plane. Clearly, cars need to be outlawed. Or roads.

I hate terrorism pieces. The stupid just plain burns.

How does this app work? I really don't see how it's possible.

ADS-B is an automatic broadcast of an airplane's position and velocity, intended for making management of the airspace easer, among other things. It is not encrypted, and you can set up the hardware to receive the signal with a modest amount of effort. There is apparently a website somewhere where these hobbyists are aggregating this data.

Then this data must be encrypted.

And since it would be an obvious security risk to allow bad guys (ie foreigners) to access this data then none US aircraft couldn't be allowed to fly in the same airspace as non-Us aircraft. So US aircraft couldn't be allowed to fly abroad and foreign aircraft couldn't be allowed in the US.

Operation complete isolation (as the proposal is known) would greatly increase security.

What's the threat model here?

Exactly, what's the threat model? If I were a terrorist with a ground-to-air missile, would it matter to me whether I blew up a specific plane or just the first Jumbo-class plane of $country's airline to take off? Would it matter to society at large whether a plane had been randomly or specifically targeted?

If I were to write a program on the spot to do this, I would integrate the video function with my program to isolate objects in the field of view, calculate relative size based on known data of airplanes which would give me distance to the object. I could then use that with my known elevation from GPS to calculate altitude. If I had to I would make the picture need a horizon and use some simple trigonometry to get altitude. I could then use some beautiful math to plot the general course of the airplane with a few samples of the objects motion in my camera's field of view. With all this data, I could cross it with scheduled flights from all airlines to get the rest of the data needed to get me the flight number and actual course. And that's off the top of my head. Don't really know how it works.

Or... If you've seen the Google Skymap app, you know that it's possible to determine what part of the sky the phone is pointing at in addition to where the phone is located. That gives you a rectangular cone which contains everything the phone can 'see'. A little geometry and the flightpath data and you can figure out which flights are passing through the cone and how far away they are; the close ones are probably the ones the user is interested in.

That sounds neat. I didn't now about the Skymap app. I've stopped browsing apps since my Iphone went through the washer. It goes to show that there are many ways to achieve the desired goal, so the real issue is not ADS-B systems but freedom vs. safety and how much are we will to give of one to get the other.

http://www.flightradar24.com/ <-- how is it much easier than a laptop with an internet connection?

Found by: Google Search. Search phrase: "ADS-B online" (without quotes) 6th link.

Also: http://www.flightstats.com/go/FlightTracker/flightTracker.do

As much as I dislike scaremongering about attacks on aircraft this sort of thing does lower the barrier of entry so to speak especially for solo nutbags. Given that the information is freely available however the issue is with the ADS-B system rather than the iPhone app.

Pray tell, how does this lower the "barrier to entry"? Are we presuming that terrorists are stone deaf, nearly blind, and incapable of memorizing daily aircraft routes?

If so, I agree with you, and further suggest banning iPhone-holders for Stinger missiles.

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