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Hacking an Airliner Through Its Wi-Fi Is Pretty Much Impossible

The worst you should expect is a Louis CK-style wi-fi breakdown.

While it's hard to remember a year with more high-profile commercial aviation disasters, nervous air passengers should hold onto this fact: hacking an airliner is still probably impossible.

Drumming up some hype before his Black Hat talk, cybersecurity researcher Ruben Santamarta told Reuters that he has figured out how to hack the satellite communications equipment on passenger jets through their wi-fi and in-flight entertainment systems.

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"In theory, a hacker could use a plane's on-board wi-fi signal or in-flight entertainment system to hack into its avionics equipment, potentially disrupting or modifying satellite communications, which could interfere with the aircraft's navigation and safety systems," Reuters quoted Santamarta as saying.

This is far from the first time that someone has claimed that he could hack an airliner. Just over a year ago a guy named Hugo Teso claimed that he could hack an airliner using just an Android app, only for the FAA to point out that Teso had totally gamed the demonstration by hacking equipment that no airlines actually use.

We'll have to wait until Santamarta's Black Hat presentation to know for sure, but whatever Santamarta's cooked up, it doesn't sound life threatening, even if it'll probably be helpful to see what vulnerabilities he did find. Even as the internet of everything consumes literally everything, and computers slowly replace everything from the cables that control the wings to airline meals (what's on everyone's tray, man?), you're going to be okay.

For starters, everyone Reuters talked to seemed skeptical about his results. Hughes spokeswoman Judy Blake said that the worst a hacker could do is to disable the communication link. Harris spokesman Jim Burke said they reviewed the paper and "concluded that the risk of compromise is very small." An Iridium spokesman also called the risk minimal.

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Granted, the companies themselves don't want to admit that they've been running around with their security trousers down around their ankles, but even Vincenzo Iozzo, a member of Black Hat's review board, admits, "I am not sure we can actually launch an attack from the passenger in-flight entertainment system into the cockpit."

So, probably not a problem, I realize, isn't a great comfort. But there's only one airliner that's known to have a connection between the passenger internet network and the networks that control the plane's navigation and maintenance systems: Boeing's new 787, one of the only airliners to have been designed with passenger wifi in mind. All the other airliners, you can be confident, have a nice air-gap between the two systems, and all Santamarta is going to demonstrate will be that he can mess up the little map you can choose if there's nothing good on TV, or just make all the TVs show Matrix Revolutions. Annoying, but far from fatal.

As for the 787, the FAA itself pointed out this unprecedented little quirk, not calling it a vulnerability, but rather just a potential vulnerability. And so Boeing had to then demonstrate that it isn't a real-life vulnerability. Extra-scrutiny. No problem, right?

But OK, OK, federal regulations don't give you much comfort. Let's talk the worst plausible scenario: the airplane doesn't just lose wi-fi, it loses satellite communication, even though as we've established, they're separate systems on all airliners in-use. If someone hacks that, are you plunging from the sky?

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Of course not. You're not even lost. Your airliner has whole contingencies in place for just such an eventuality, which the BBC covered in its lovely "A Day Without Satellites," which seems like a just fine sort of day to me. Writing about airline GPS, the BBC said:

"GPS satellites are little more than highly accurate atomic clocks in space, transmitting a time signal back to Earth. Receivers on the ground – in your car or smartphone for instance – pick up these time signals from three or more satellites. By comparing the time signal from space with the time in the receiver – the receiver can calculate how far away the satellite is.

When the GPS signals stop, back-up systems (employing accurate clocks on the ground) kick in."

What's important is that you're going to get to the ground. Even if the impossible happened, and the passenger wi-fi could be used to mess up something important, the pilots can always just kill the aircraft's wi-fi system whenever they want.

Look, the year has really driven home the strange and tragic things that can happen to airplanes. But I've got a ticket on a plane on Friday, and I'm not going to lose any sleep over Black Hat hype. And I'm sure if you saw how this years attendees were getting to Vegas, you wouldn't either.