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Comment by c7DJTLrn | Hacker News Reader

It would be nice if you could send a POST request to open the door if you want some fresh air.

I tried to change the flight level by PATCHing altitude, but it seemed to require authentication. Oh well.

Maybe you can take risks like that, but I certainly can’t. I don’t think anyone with my name or skin color would be given the benefit of the doubt for even a moment.

let me guess, you experience “random selection” events more than the expected amount?

apologies for joking. it must suck.

Oh yes. Reminds me of the XKCD rand() comic!

Your comment made my day. Eye opening

This sounds like a good way to meet some upset people with expensive sunglasses shortly after you land.

It's not like that at all. The sunglasses aren't that expensive.

after you land also open to interpretation

Someone will probably figure out how to send a request to disable auto-pilot or turn off the fasten seat belt sign.

the airline industry is nowhere nearly as stupid as the software industry with things like this.

the communication between plane and wifi/entertainment system, if there is any, is almost certainly one-way. likely, the wifi system providing this info is receiving data from the flight systems and repeating it or transforming it a bit and providing that.

it would not surprise me at all if the flight attendants have to program everything about the flight into the system prior to departure each flight, and there is no communication from the aircraft at all.

"The computer network in the Dreamliner's passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane's control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals." [1]

(I guess there's some kind of firewall, but we know that those are not always perfect)

[1] https://www.wired.com/2008/01/dreamliner-security/

Not a problem as long as you reboot your Dreamliner every once in a while: https://www.theregister.com/2020/04/02/boeing_787_power_cycl...

IIRC the in-flight infotainment systems are entirely separate from the avionics control systems at the data layer. I recall being told that in some cases even the flight status is actually pulled from a 3p api service rather than hooked into the onboard avionics.

There could be some fuckery via shared power or other non-data systems but that’s probably beyond someone sitting in a seat with standard laptop hardware.

If the latter was true, then "wheelWeightState" (and others) would not work. But, they do work.

The weight-on-wheels switch reports its in-the-air status over ADSB. It errs in the direction of assuming in-the-air, which was implicated in a near miss on the ground in 2020 between two Air Canada flights[1][2]

1: https://www.tsb.gc.ca/eng/rapports-reports/aviation/2020/A20...

2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nj7nG6gJqsU

Not necessarily. All this could be reported up to airline HQ through the satellite link and then the IFE/customer WiFi could be downloading it again to serve locally.

That would prevent any need for direct connection between the systems.

Is that how it works? I doubt it. But it could be done.

Might be one way, but that doesn't mean you can't DDoS it (by accident or otherwise).

Is this the thread where the web developers speculate wildly without facts or evidence and pretend to know more about airplanes than the aerospace engineers who built it?

Maybe it would help if Boeing 737's crash wasn't making the case for such incompetence.

Please stand by, a DHS agent will be with you shortly

DELTE

You probably can. I suspect airliner software is appallingly insecure.

Relies very strongly on simple airgapping. Can't do anything to it if there's no wires in the direction you want. Can't remotely hack if there's nothing antenna connected that can talk to flight control. It has the luxury of not needing to do the "limited RCE" that is a modern web request

Reminds me of an episode of Leverage where they wanted to hack into Congress and change the text of a bill. In the show, it turned out everything was airgapped so they had to send a person to drop off a paper copy of the compromised bill. Hmm, that was also a plot line in Better Call Saul.

In the article above, in-flight wifi has an API reporting position, altitude, and velocity. That is a feed from avionics, which renders the claim of airgapped systems essentially null.

They could, for the sake of a ridiculous but clear example, have a display hooked up to the avionics and a camera hooked up to a separate computer which reads the values.

There are various ways of connecting systems while physically guaranteeing one way data flow—a fiber optic link with the transmitter removed from one end and the receiver removed from the other is basically a less silly “camera pointed at a display” and used in the real world.

You could argue the exact semantics of “air gapped”, but for the discussion here that’s accomplishing the same thing. The fact that the passenger network has some visibility into the avionics network is not, in and of itself, any indication of an issue.

+1. Instead of saying "airgap" a term I've seen for what you're describing is "data diode".

The plane has a transponder that reports this information to the ground, ATC, other aircraft etc. The infotainment server has a receiver that gets this data. Or in some cases they instead pull it from a ground based service via the internet. The transponder is not able to receive signals, so it is air gapped.

A quick review of published information reveals this claim as false. A typical airliner FMS feeds information to IFE via gateway devices. The integration is intended to be one-way. Airgapped they are not.

Such analytical delusions are the first step on the road to failing to adequately mitigate threats. As practiced by “it can’t happen here” school of fucking up.

Fortunately, it seems far more likely that aircraft system designers do not rely on any such assumption, and practice defence in depth. There was a good talk at DEFCON 22 by Phil Polstra on the matter.

Documentation please?

The talk above is available online.

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