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A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

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Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#251

Post by pingyong »

astrange wrote: post #213
Gibbon1 wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

UB was invented for the purpose of optimizing. No UB, no optimizing. And nobody is interested in funding or working on compilers that don't optimize. Anyway, just test with ubsan and you'll be good.

Name one example where UB is necessary for useful optimizations where simply having unspecified values or platform dependent behavior wouldn't be enough.

Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#252

Post by lordlimecat »

snovv_crash wrote: post #227
icebraining wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Data dioses don't prevent malicious data that exploits vulnerabilities and takes over from being transmitted, they only prevent the malware from communicating back.

It turns a black box into black hole, making it basically impossible to hack unless you have prior knowledge of what is on the other side.

Security through obscurity! And I'm sure it will thwart nation state actors with potential access to the system in question.

Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#254

Post by teddyuk »

taneq wrote: post #239
tyingq wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Searched a bit more, and found this from 2018: "Experts are still not sure of the root cause of the malfunction in the data unit, but subsequent software changes by Airbus mean any similar error in the future won’t lead to another terrifying nosedive." https://www.news.com.au/travel/travel-updates/incidents/terr... Sounds like I guessed right.

Wow, "we don't know what went wrong but we're certain we fixed it!" That's nice and convincing...

and almost always turns out to be false :)

Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#256

Post by gsnedders »

stefco_ wrote: post #159
blackflame7000 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you look at the Top 7 safest airplanes in terms of accidents per hours flown you get: 1) Airbus A340 - No crashes 2) Boeing 777 - 5 crashes, 2 intentional (Malaysia x2), 1 engine-related (Rolls-Royce problem), 2 pilot-error (Asiana/Dubai) - [Thanks fishywang] 3) Boeing 747-8 4) Boeing 737-NG 5) Boeing 767 6) Airbus A320 7) Boeing 757

Also worth pointing out that there are 4 times as many 777s as there are A340s. Doesn’t mean A340 isn’t great, just that the odds of no accidents go up with fewer flight hours. The popularity of A320 and 737-NG makes their safety records particularly impressive.

Also the A320/737NG typically fly more shorter segments so spend proportionally more time in the critical phases of flight.

Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#257

Post by isostatic »

microcolonel wrote: post #225
jdavis703 wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can tell you traffic lights are extremely insecure. Last month there was a traffic light that was turned the wrong way, such that it was impossible to tell if the light was green. So I climbed the poll and turned it to the right direction. Another fellow pedastrian thanked me. A bad actor could do anything from a DOS (positioning it the wrong direction) to tampering with the bulbs (for example swapping out all the…

> tampering with the bulbs (for example swapping out all the greens with reds). Traffic authorities use coloured bulbs where you are? Weird. Where I am, as far as I'm aware the colours always come from a gel in front of the lamp. Furthermore, the red lamp holder is larger than the green and amber ones.

Don't you have LED lights?

Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#258

Post by Waterluvian »

jdavis703 wrote: post #176
Waterluvian wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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…

Here's some photo evidence from Palo Alto, CA, USA: https://imgur.com/a/NxmphG6 . Note how both lights are parallel when they should be perpendicular.

Ah yeah I see now. Very cool. Very different! Ours generally look like this: http://i.imgur.com/m9fAs.jpg

So you'd need some equipment to do anything to them. And that equipment would have to basically shut down the intersection. So do it at 4am and hope that nobody drives by for the half hour you're there.

Re: A Boeing Code Leak Exposes Security Flaws Deep in a 787's Guts

#260

Post by jquery »

WalterBright wrote: post #204
jquery wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was always irrationally nervous flying into SFO, worried about precisely what ended up happening. We should all be glad the plane mostly held together through the cartwheel, saving many lives.

I can confidently assert that no airframe is designed with cartwheeling in mind. Nor hitting trees/buildings/cliffs.

True, it's not part of the certification process, but I do know that modern jets airframes are made to be as... um... "flexible"* (? searching for the word here...) as possible in catastrophic situations. An older airframe probably would have disintegrated under the same forces.

Luck and good fortune also played a huge role of course. What the pilots did was unconscionably neglectful. CFIT is often (usually?) fatal for all passengers.

*EDIT: It's similar to software that's written to be extremely robust that encounters an unexpected error (or set of errors). The software wasn't necessarily designed to handle it, but sometimes it can nonetheless.

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