A vulnerability that can be exploited to tamper with a train’s brakes | Hacker News Reader

A vulnerability that can be exploited to tamper with a train’s brakes

securityweek.com

20 points01-_-10 comments

Shocking, not shocking. Worked for a company more than two decades ago that ran a lot of shortlines.

Called out several different vulnerabilities that I found while researching how to make things more efficient (the company owning the tracks get charged for the car lease while it's on their tracks).

Nothing came of it though. They were more worried about replacing infrastructure after several cars toppled because the ties had rotted.

While this is bad… keep in mind you can also stop trains with a jumper cable across the tracks, too.

https://hackaday.com/2016/12/14/protesters-use-jumper-cables...

Yeah. Exactly. The consequence of this club is either:

1) The brakes take an extra couple seconds to apply (note: this is only used on long trains… so stopping is over a minute anyway)

2) The emergency brakes apply. This is considered a safe condition, and for Positive Train Control is considered the ‘safe state’.

If someone tries to utilize this vulnerability, the EOT device will be shutoff. On the few tracks where it’s actually required, there are mitigations to still operate safely.

This would be really easy to annoy a single train crew. This would be really hard to do to geographically diverse trains.

Don’t know about today, but you used to be able to drop the gates with a nail.

This looks like an exploit for all future train control systems (TCS)

Does including a three-letter acronym (TLA) make your answer look informed (ALI)?

Because it's an article about outdated systems. Radio-controlled systems built in the last ten years, and in the future, are all mandated to be encrypted.

Furthermore, very few passenger train systems are radio-controlled. Instead, just like cars and buses, control is decentralized to the individual vehicle, and automated based on feedback from the track. No feedback, and the train stops.

This ist a standard and ancient sender/receiver problem of communication. However, I'm glad you like big machines and seem interested enough to dive deeper into this topic. The official acronym TCS is still no match to your creativeness, please take it easy, as if you plan to do some research on this you will encounter a lot of those.

>“The End-of-Train (EOT) and Head-of-Train (HOT) vulnerability has been understood and monitored by rail sector stakeholders for over a decade. To exploit this issue, a threat actor would require physical access to rail lines, deep protocol knowledge, and specialized equipment, which limits the feasibility of widespread exploitation—particularly without a large, distributed presence in the U.S.

Sure, thats reaaaally unlikely hey... /S

USA trying to make is public transport system even less popular.

I believe this is only used on one passenger line in the entire country. This is really a freight based system intended to transmit brake apply signals as speed of light instead of speed of sound.

Since passenger trains are usually short and often have a wired bus) they don’t really need this system.

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