How to Hack an Airplanes Satellite Communications System. LAS VEGAS — Gone are the days of mile-high airplane hijackings carried out with guns or knifes. In the future all a hijacker or a terrorist might need is a computer or a smartphone — and some good hacker skills.Ruben Santamarta, a security researcher atIOActive, showed a packed room at theBlack Hatsecurity conference in Las Vegas on Thursday how several types of satellite communications equipment used in airplanes all over the world can be hacked. Taking advantage of critical holes in these devices, an attackercould tamper with the planes satellite communications, he said, interfering with its navigation and safety systems.And all theyd need is to be on a planes WiFi and in-flight entertainment system. That doesnt mean we can crash an aircraft,That doesnt mean we can crash an aircraft,Santamarta said during a press conference ahead of his talk. But he did say a hack like this could lead to dangerous situations, like a scenario in whicha pilot is fed fake data from the ground.Santamartas findings might be hard to replicate in the real world. They were done in a lab, reverse engineering the firmware of the devices. But they do show that manufacturers selling equipment commonly deployed in airplanes have left gaping holes in their hardware.The fact is that those vulnerabilities are there, so maybe its possible, maybe not, Santamarta said. But its something that should be fixed.Other experts agreed. The type of vulnerabilities he discovered are pretty scary just because they involve very basic security things that vendors should already be aware of, Vincenzo Iozzo, a member of Black Hats review board, toldReuters, which first reported on Santamartas research.The manufacturers of the devices, however, all dismissed the research, saying the risks areminimal or small or that the hackers would need physical access to the device to carry out the exploit.IOActive already published awhitepaperon this topic in April, but Santamarta disclosed new technical details at his talk on Thursday.Security researchers have been looking into airplane systems security for some time. Last year, Hugo Teso showed how a hacker could exploit a protocol used to transmit data to commercial airplanes from the ground with an Android phone, potentially giving the hacker the ability totake over the plane, via a malicious radio signal.As with Santamartas research, Tesos was also done only at an experimental level. It was dismissed as unlikely to work by European and American aviation authorities.Also at Black Hat in 2012, another researcher showed he could makenonexistent planes appearon the screen of air traffic controllers, perhaps scaring real planes into trying to avoid them. This hack took advantage of a vulnerability in the next-generation air traffic control system, the Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast(ADS-B).Have something to add to this story? Share it in the comments.
Posted on: Sun, 21 Sep 2014 17:51:45 +0000
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