All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem • Hacker News Board

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#21

Post by teacup50 » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:40 PM UTC

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

minot wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> An air gap or air wall is a network security measure that consists of ensuring that a secure computer network is physically isolated from unsecured networks, such as the public Internet or an unsecured local area network. It is often taken for computers and networks that must be extraordinarily secure. Frequently the air gap is not completely literal, such as via the use of dedicated cryptographic devices that can…

You can also accomplish a one-way airgap using optics that can only pass data in one direction.

The security of such a thing assumes that:

1) The system can't be compromised through input data.

2) There's no other output mechanism by which an attacker could retrieve data (or watch the plane crash, which technically counts as output).

I'm not sure I buy the idea for contexts where a genuine security airgap is required.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#22

Post by theandrewbailey » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

This is the Achilles heel of the entire Internet of Things and smart appliance trend, and I think this will bite everyone bad. After 50+% of these vendors go out of business in the next decade, their products won't get updated, and people will wonder why their "smart" TV can't watch movies from whatever replaced Netflix/new whizbang video service. They won't be as likely to buy any "smart" thing again.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#23

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:42 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

There is a huge cadence mismatch between software cycles and capital good replacement cycles.

How well would you say that Tesla is coping with this as a company? For that matter, what about Apple?

I can't even imagine the number of security patches that have gone into the Linux kernel in the last 11 years.

Let's take a step back and think about this statement. Isn't this insane? We know enough to be able to build something much better than this. The reason that we don't, is that we've just kept on pragmatically building on what we had before. We're like a corporation that keeps pouring money into its "stovepipe" system because we keep on making short-term decisions. (Somehow "stovepipe" has come to mean "vertically isolated," but I seem to remember that it also used to refer to the tendency of iron stovepipes to corrode and need constant patching.)

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#24

Post by dba7dba » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:43 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

Considering the ridiculous amount of testing required (rightly so) for any change on the jetliners, they probably cannot keep up with the patches.

One Windows running company I worked for long time ago simply didn't apply the patches. They said it broke things...

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#25

Post by jewel » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:43 PM UTC

atonse wrote: post #15

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also accomplish a one-way airgap using optics that can only pass data in one direction.

How can that ever work? If you're using TCP/IP, you always need to receive an acknowledgement that what you sent actually got to the destination, right? Or does raw fiber use different protocols?

You're right, TCP/IP wouldn't work. UDP would work fine though, as well as anything lower level. You'd just continually send packets at a rate that was slow enough that there'd be no reason that the other side would drop them.

Imagine that the designers want to send information about the plane's expected arrival time to the in-flight entertainment system. You could send a packet once per minute, without any knowledge of whether or not anyone is even listening. If an update is missed, it doesn't matter since the information rapidly becomes stale.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#26

Post by geraldcombs » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:44 PM UTC

karambahh wrote: post #16

toomuchtodo wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also accomplish a one-way airgap using optics that can only pass data in one direction.

I was at a security trade show earlier this year and some companies were marketing "FTP diode": one way FTP transfert. I did not have time to discuss it with them, but how a tcp based protocol could be "one way" just does not make sense to me...

This sounds an awful lot like a standard FTP server configured with a write-only directory.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#27

Post by na85 » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:46 PM UTC

schneidmaster wrote: post #12

rubicon33 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "air gapped" mean?

Completely disconnected. It refers to the physical metaphor of having a gap of air (no wired connections) between critical systems (like the flight software) and other systems (like the entertainment system), although it's sometimes implemented via software means such as cryptographic tunneling rather than a physical gap.

>although it's sometimes implemented via software means such as cryptographic tunneling rather than a physical gap.

I've never heard the term "air gap" refer to something that is actually only segmented in software, crypto or no.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#28

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:47 PM UTC

theandrewbailey wrote: post #22

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

This is the Achilles heel of the entire Internet of Things and smart appliance trend, and I think this will bite everyone bad. After 50+% of these vendors go out of business in the next decade, their products won't get updated, and people will wonder why their "smart" TV can't watch movies from whatever replaced Netflix/new whizbang video service. They won't be as likely to buy any "smart" thing again.

Probably the only reason why your ca. 2005 linux media pc won't work in your current living room is that its hardware can't support your new 4K flatscreen. Open software could go some way towards addressing the update problem, but it would need to have a much more robust code signing infrastructure behind it, to avoid becoming an even worse morass of security problems than the morass we have today. (Generally, not in open software.)

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#29

Post by stcredzero » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:51 PM UTC

dba7dba wrote: post #24

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

Considering the ridiculous amount of testing required (rightly so) for any change on the jetliners, they probably cannot keep up with the patches. One Windows running company I worked for long time ago simply didn't apply the patches. They said it broke things...

I've had demos ruined by iOS 8.x patches! (By changes to pretty well established code, like NSTimer and UIImageView updating.) I could easily believe that Windows patches would break things.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#30

Post by nostromo » Tue, Jun 02, 2015, 4:53 PM UTC

krschultz wrote: post #2

I was flying from Dublin to Newark on Saturday on a United flight. At some point during our flight the entertainment system needed to be rebooted. When it came back up, the splash screen hit me with a huge amount of nostalgia. It was RedBoot with a kernel build date from 2004. Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical, but it's telling. There is a huge cadence mismatch between softwar…

> Obviously this is the entertainment system and not something more critical

According to recent reports, the entertainment system is not fully isolated from the plane's navigation systems. However, Boeing has denied this.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/05/17/us/fbi-hacker-flight-computer-...