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All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

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Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#41

Post by VLM »

saganus wrote: post #14
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.

Can you elaborate a bit more please? This sounds almost as if you configured a network adapter to only send and not receive, but you used "optics", so I'm guessing you refer to some sort of fibre-based device that actually impedes light to go in the other direction, and thus the security is via physical means?

Google for something like "fiber converter". Normally if you run a copper ethernet cable between two buildings its a lightning magnet and next thunderstorm you'll get a big enough ground loop to blow up the gear on one side or the other if not both. So for $50 (seriously) you can buy a gadget thats been around for at least 20 years that has ethernet on one side and two fiber SC connectors on the other side of the box and you run non-conductive fiber between the buildings and sneer at the lightning gods whom will simply take their vengeance in another way LOL.

All you need to do is only run one fiber jumper, the TX from one side to the RX on another, not the two you're "supposed to" use. SNMP traps run on UDP and work just fine, old style syslog runs over one way UDP too. Note that your production/secure network can DDOS your IT/insecure network if enough people on the secure side try to use a DNS or NFS server on the insecure side, it'll just spam packets forever and never get its response, so its not like firewalls are completely pointless.

In the really old days we'd do something similar to RS-232 cables, physically yank out pin 2 or pin 3 (conveniently they swapped TX/RX on 9 pin vs 25 pin RS232). PPP negotiates connections, SLIP doesn't care and works great.

(edited to add another thing we did back when 10 meg ethernet was "new" and just replacing thinnet and thicknet, was pulling the approriate pins for TX, before auto negotiation existed, before 100 meg ethernet even existed, you could get away with that... I suppose if you had two smart-ish switches that could be forced to 10 meg no negotiation, you could do this today...)

Also there were production machines that output error, alert, and log messages to theoretically directly attached parallel port printers and there also existed converters that could go from parallel port to serial port (presumably for serial port printers, which really did exist in the 80s), which makes a pretty good unidirectional connection from a secured device to a semi-secured logging server. Bidirectional parallel ports didn't really exist until maybe 1990 or so and never did standardize, not really.

I made a lot of money implementing this kind of stuff in the 90s. It was fun.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#42

Post by a3n »

jsingleton wrote: post #32

Could be a similar issue to the recent electronic flight bag issue. Certainly reads that way from the article. They seem very quick to blame a hack when it could very easily be a bug in the system or an administrator error. http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/apr/29/apple-ipad...

Have they actually officially blamed anything?

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#43

Post by djcapelis »

A lot of people seem to be jumping to the conclusion that their systems are malfunctioning because of being hacked rather than their systems malfunctioning on their own. Hard to know what is happening from the outside, but their systems may just merely be bad.

That said, the plane communication protocols aren't terribly secure, so it's certainly feasible someone is playing around with them. Maybe they'll decide it's in our interest for us to know at some point.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#44

Post by snowwrestler »

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.

I bought an LG smart TV a while ago. It stopped receiving firmware updates after a couple years and is now way behind current models in terms of features--and, I can only imagine, security patches.

I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#45

Post by rcraft »

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.

This is exactly why I prefer buying "dumb" tvs and simply adding chromecast/appletv/firetv, etc. Much better experience.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#46

Post by toomuchtodo »

VLM wrote: post #41
saganus wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you elaborate a bit more please? This sounds almost as if you configured a network adapter to only send and not receive, but you used "optics", so I'm guessing you refer to some sort of fibre-based device that actually impedes light to go in the other direction, and thus the security is via physical means?

Google for something like "fiber converter". Normally if you run a copper ethernet cable between two buildings its a lightning magnet and next thunderstorm you'll get a big enough ground loop to blow up the gear on one side or the other if not both. So for $50 (seriously) you can buy a gadget thats been around for at least 20 years that has ethernet on one side and two fiber SC connectors on the other side of the box…

Thanks for the informational post!

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#47

Post by Cacti »

nostromo wrote: post #30
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-...

That's because the researcher didn't do that on an actual plane. In fact it wasn't even a simulator, it was a virtualized simulator where he put the systems all on the same bus. On top of that the guy was only able to listen in on traffic.

The entire story is bogus.

The systems are isolated just fine.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#48

Post by tobinfricke »

josephmosby wrote: post #13
rubicon33 wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does "air gapped" mean?

"Air gapped" means that there is a physical separation between two networks (i.e., there's "air" between them). If two networks are physically connected, there is always a chance that someone could bypass any software security restrictions. If the two networks aren't physically connected, there's no way to gain access to one network from another. In this instance, the inflight entertainment network and the avionics n…

The phrase no longer makes literal sense in this day of ubiquitous wireless communications.

"If the two networks aren't physically connected, there's no way to gain access to one network from another" is no longer true.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#49

Post by cma »

snowwrestler wrote: post #44
theandrewbailey wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I bought an LG smart TV a while ago. It stopped receiving firmware updates after a couple years and is now way behind current models in terms of features--and, I can only imagine, security patches. I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time.

Mine updated itself to add a big banner advertisement to the main screen. It originally had no ads.

Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem

#50

Post by goatforce5 »

rubicon33 wrote: post #4
arca_vorago wrote: post #3

From what I understand of the Chris Roberts fiasco, their avionics systems weren't airgapped from the other systems. If that is the case and not just hype, then no fucking wonder shit like this can happen.

What does "air gapped" mean?

You can transfer files across an air gap using:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

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