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Comment by Two4 | Hacker News Reader

Imagine a scenario where a plane is carrying a person who is enemy to a certain nation state. A nation state who is not above, say, using umbrella air dart guns to poison their enemies with radioactive compounds - just to make it clear that we're solidly in the realm of using James Bond style bullshit to secure national interests in our particular scenario. If this nation state were to plant a device on the avionics bus that would spoof the airspeed readout and cause the pilot to nose up on takeoff before the plane has reached critical velocity, it would be very difficult to find this device in the aftermath of the fiery crash, and also very difficult to not blame this on a faulty sensor or pilot error. I say fiery, because there would likely be a full tank of fuel, further reducing survivability in this scenario. A scary thought.

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Maybe if it crashed in the ocean. If it crashed on land, then they would almost certainly find the device in the wreckage as in the Pan Am 103 bombing [1] where they found even scraps of disintegrated clothing in the suitcase carrying the bomb. The flight recorder would also almost certainly show the nonsensical inputs and outputs and the pilot confusion. And, unlike other industries, aviation does real root cause analysis to identify every factor involved in a crash so it would be exceedingly unlikely they would throw their hands up into the air and just blame the pilot or something as stupid like that.

The chances of a attack like this being undetectable are exceedingly low. You would likely need to compromise nearly every aspect of the plane to make sure you have suppressed every available cross-checking mechanism. Does not stop it from happening, but it would not, in any way, be some sort of magic assassin weapon.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pan_Am_Flight_103_bombing_inve...

A bit OT: The little remembered thing with Lockerbie is that they knew something was really weird before the debris hit the ground.

It wasn't the super deep check of the debris that pointed them to a bomb,it was a process that started with watching debris on primary radars fall away from a point where a moment before a transponder was squawking, it was finding the pressure spike on VCR and FDR, it was finding explicit explosion-affected parts, which guided which parts to reconstruct in 3D (very rare thing to do), and to finally find remains of the bomb itself.

Depending on who the attacker is, the attack being undetectable might not matter. Russia has assassinated multiple people using polonium, and what was the response? Crickets. They could easily do the same thing to assassinate other people they don't like (along with plane-loads of other passengers), and the only result will be angry words and "condemnation".

I doubt those Russian assassinations were ever meant to be undetectable. Rather they were intentional spectacles, where there's no doubt in who was behind it. The goal is to make it obvious, but also deny it officially, while knowing that everybody knows they're lying, just to mock their opponents.

Exactly. I can see them doing the exact same thing with an exploit like this. The point wouldn't be to be undetectable, but rather to be sure the assassination attempt will actually work as intended, and to cause a big spectacle (few things generate news headlines like big airplane crashes).

Both Poland and Iran have lost regionally inconvenient heads of state to crashes in fog.

I think there is concern there with undiagnosable crashes, but also a more pronounced concern with hijacking. If you have access to the plane you can just plant a bomb. With this you could capture the plane for hostage or turn it into a missile.

In case of Polish crash, according to the official Polish government report, the Russian involvement is more than possible: https://www.smolenskcrashnews.com/pdf/2022-smolensk-crash-re...

Why wouldn’t you just mess with a mechanical component or simply murder someone without doing it while they are on an airplane?

Car bombings still happen sometimes but it’s much easier to just shoot someone or push them off a balcony.

Why wasn't Prigozhin killed on the ground?

Presumably because he was surrounded by troops reasonably loyal to him, making any assassination difficult.

That he was killed by manipulating the data bus seems entirely speculative and exceedingly unlikely. If you have that kind of access to the plane you can plant a bomb or if you just want to down the plane Russia has potent anti-air weapons which trivially can take down a sub sonic passenger jet.

path of least resistance?

This can be accomplished just as easily by targeting the analog input for the actuators or the analog input of the stick. Or attack one of the other myriads safety critical systems outside of the bus.

And... attacking manually gives more plausibility to it being an accident rather than having a dongle attached to the plane, or code potentially surviving on the system.

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