Who's the guy in the in-flight entertainment system?
anders.io
anders.io
But as it is on an airplane traveling 900km/h 10 000m in the air. I dont feel like poking at stuff that is connected to the stuff that is keeping me and the other passengers alive.
Also it i don't feel like speeding life in prison.
But those things don't exactly feel like top quality stuff. They feel more like something that than be crashed and taken over in 20 minutes using a teensy++ and a Linux laptop.
Just about every other industry has to worry about Compsec researchers busting in and screaming that the end is nigh. But not airplanes. You even try touching one of them and you will be in for quite a ride through the joys of bureaucracy.
It's the basis of QA, your customers will use your product in ways you never intended. It could go on to say that through your customers misuse of the product you will be able to make your product better.
But with planes, the intended use gets so much more critical and the number of people who test it gets incredibly low. If these systems aren't tested, errors wont be found. And one day someone is going to hook up to a plane and try to bring it down. And it is because of this lack of use outside of intention that an attacker will be successful.
Obviously, I never want to be on a plane next to a security researcher plugged into the aircraft, but I think the secrecy around aircraft is their biggest vulnerability. A solution that would work somewhat counter intuitively would be parking a plane at LAS this summer for all the Black Hat and DEF CON attendees to play with. The resulting publications would without a doubt revolutionize aircraft security.
EDIT:Just fixing some grammar here and there.
Hackers Remotely Kill a Boeing during Flight - With Me in It
http://www.wired.com/2015/04/hackers-commandeer-new-planes-p...
And even so if the screen in-front of every passenger did then started to spew a bunch of boot logs and generally behave strangely. I beet people would become quite scared.
But most new planes coming off the ground today are moving to Android based systems, since they have many advantages - it's much easier to get content like games and apps, and cheaper to engineer and develop for.
One of the problems with IFE systems today is that both A380 and 787 deliveries have been significantly delayed - often the IFE hardware is just sitting in a warehouse for several years waiting for the plane to catch up to it. So by the time the plane finally is delivered to the customer the IFE system may already be 4-5 years out of date.
I tried to hack at it by specifying the semicolon and such, but could not get it to do more.
I observed they had it at least mildly secure - it would not accept input for some special characters when typed; they would simply not appear on the screen within the game. But clearly there are holes in these. Without more information on the construction it was not trivial though.