Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
1–10 of 45 posts
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#2Sounds more like a bug rather than a lack of memory to me ...
The flight plan did not contain an altitude for the flight, one of the sources said. While a controller entered the usual altitude for a U-2 plane - about 60,000 feet - the system began to consider all altitudes between ground level and infinity.
The conflict generated error messages and caused the system to begin cycling through restarts.
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#3Sounds more like a bug rather than a lack of memory to me ... The flight plan did not contain an altitude for the flight, one of the sources said. While a controller entered the usual altitude for a U-2 plane - about 60,000 feet - the system began to consider all altitudes between ground level and infinity. The conflict generated error messages and caused the system to begin cycling through restarts.
They didn't have enough memory to cope with an infinite number of inputs.
Obviously a hardware problem...
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#4Sounds more like a bug rather than a lack of memory to me ... The flight plan did not contain an altitude for the flight, one of the sources said. While a controller entered the usual altitude for a U-2 plane - about 60,000 feet - the system began to consider all altitudes between ground level and infinity. The conflict generated error messages and caused the system to begin cycling through restarts.
They didn't have enough memory to cope with an infinite number of inputs. Obviously a hardware problem...
is there a plane that flies at infinite altitude?
Is there an aircraft of concern to the FAA that flies above FL1000? One or two historic flights have been that high, so raise the ceiling to 150,000'
still not infinite.
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#5said Dan Kaminsky, co-founder of the White Ops security firm and an expert in attacks based on over-filling areas of computer memory.
That sounds more like buffer overrun than OOM. One is a Heartbleed-class vulnerability, the other is a pretty straightforward DoS situation. But of course why would we expect Reuters to be able to distinguish between the two...
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#6Having worked on ATC, this really does sound like a software bug. Fixing such a bug on a delivered system would require an immense amount of costly testing. Adding memory is the cheap option.
The other thing to consider is that some of these systems are rather old and could easily have less than a gig of ram.
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't have enough memory to cope with an infinite number of inputs. Obviously a hardware problem...
is there a plane that flies at infinite altitude? Is there an aircraft of concern to the FAA that flies above FL1000? One or two historic flights have been that high, so raise the ceiling to 150,000' still not infinite.
I think hudibras was been sarcastic
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#8I would guess that it was some form of an numeric overflow, signed/unsigned issue or out of bound array access, because the only abnormal thing here is U2's altitude.
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#9This is part of a system the FAA has been trying to replace (unsuccessfully) since at least 1990: http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/aviation-internationa...
(The AAS often appears in software engineering classes as an example of a classic "train wreck" project)
Re: Air traffic system failure caused by computer memory shortage
#10Sounds more like a bug rather than a lack of memory to me ... The flight plan did not contain an altitude for the flight, one of the sources said. While a controller entered the usual altitude for a U-2 plane - about 60,000 feet - the system began to consider all altitudes between ground level and infinity. The conflict generated error messages and caused the system to begin cycling through restarts.
It sounds like the altitude existence assumption caused cascading errors which in turn exhausted the system memory.