211–220 of 277 posts
I'm slightly astonished that the 3 networks mentioned aren't airgapped. I suppose the entertainment system needs to know where the plane is in order to display the flight map, but that should be provided by a dumb serial link with the RX wire cut.
My $0.02: I came across Boeing's documentation for their "Boeing Update" solution. (think Windows Update, but for 787s). It described in detail how the planes are updated with new firmware for the avionics, entertainment system, and the engines. I was shocked to learn that the 787 uses a lot of COTS kit internally, such as standard WiFi and Ethernet connections. There's an RJ-45 jack at the front landing gear accessi…
> My estimate was the the document alone would have cost multiple millions of dollars to write I get that technical documentation can be incredibly good, but even picturing the most thorough and well-written documentation book I can, what could possibly make it worth "millions of dollars to write" when writing an actual book hardly can top $100k even by going all out on expenses?
I'm sure the number of lines of code involved in a 787 is probably well into the 10s of millions. Then you've also need help of Electrical/Computer engineers, mechanical engineers, aerospace engineers and who knows what else. This isn't a simple matter of plopping a tech writer in front of a computer and "punch out the doc".
I dont imagine the systems are simple enough that you have a single engineer or developer looking at the relevant systems. I can easily see a team of well more than 50 being needed to produce such documentation, and conclude the cost of production for such documentation being $1M USD to probably being way on the low end, maybe even by an order of magnitude or more.
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LLVM is still in disagreement as to whether or not infinite loops are UB [1], and others. It is becoming more mature... But the argument about how to handle an empty infinite loop has been going on since 2015. [1] https://bugs.llvm.org/show_bug.cgi?id=24078
Offhand thought of the day. The Motor Industry Software Reliability Association should ban compilers that allow optimization based in UB. Because seriously these people need to be stopped.
Anyway, just test with ubsan and you'll be good.
I would assume in-flight entertainment is Level E and wasn't ever subjected to verification. And yeah that requires physical separation from higher-level systems. So... surprisingly I think I'm on Boeing's side here?
My $0.02: I came across Boeing's documentation for their "Boeing Update" solution. (think Windows Update, but for 787s). It described in detail how the planes are updated with new firmware for the avionics, entertainment system, and the engines. I was shocked to learn that the 787 uses a lot of COTS kit internally, such as standard WiFi and Ethernet connections. There's an RJ-45 jack at the front landing gear accessi…
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Even if the traffic lights can't be rotsteted it's relatively trivial for an bad actor to break it in some way and hanging up your permanent green light at night and then watch the chaos. As gp said: The amount of such bad actors is low. And gains from an individual hack are low and there's a chance of getting caught.
"Relatively trivial" must be relative. Traffic lights where I am require a cherry picker in the intersection to get at. This is like hacking servers. If you can get all the way to physical access with the device, of course it's exploitable. But that doesn't actually say a lot about how secure something is. I imagine the quality of the lights around the world differ. If you can climb up and adjust it, these aren't the…
How hard is it to get a cherry picker? (Check your local tool/construction rental place) What about if you climb on top of a van, or a box truck?
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Shhh. Let the new kids enjoy their smug.
I've done security auditing of ADA and C avionics code. (including for DAL-A components). As a language, I'd take Rust any day (in terms of security/robustness properties). However, the rust/LLVM compiler pipeline is nowhere near mature enough for use in high-criticality environments.
> But Boeing counters that it has both "additional protection mechanisms" in the CIS/MS that would prevent its bugs from being exploited from the ODN, and another hardware device between the semi-sensitive IDN—where the CIS/MS is located—and the highly sensitive CDN. That second barrier, the company argues, allows only data to pass from one part of the network to the other, rather than the executable commands that wo…
Every exploit payload is comprised entirely of data, so I think you’re even giving them too much credit there... The thing that triggered me the most was that they got the engineers who wrote the code to test it, and report back that their own code was fine. From the sound of it they didn’t even test the vulnerability, they just did an external test, without specifically testing the segmentation controls or the compo…
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Yea I wonder if they could partner with Microsoft Flight Sim and find bugs in their code from thousands of simulated player hours.
Not that Microsoft Flight Sim or X-Plane aren't awesome and relatively high fidelity simulators, but I don't think that's a feasible QA loop, as a) they're not simulating all flight systems on a 1:1 basis, b) even if they did have a fully to spec simulation of the flight control software, it's still insufficient because the real thing runs on specialized hardware, which is not being simulated in flight sims of this t…
It seems insane that all this code isn't just open source by default. No one's going to be able to rip off airlines by stealing it, you still need to have a company that, you know, sells planes. Keeping it closed seems like a full admission that "there are probably a bunch of bugs in here and we don't want people to see them"
Question: why would making the software open source make it any more safe? Do we really anticipate droves of engineers combing through Boeing's code helping them eliminate bugs (without some sort of bounty program)?