Is this what an actual cyberattack / cyberwar looks like?
Imagine how much money is being lost right now as a result of this disruption. Somewhere hackers are popping champagne.
All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
51–60 of 215 posts
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#52Earlier 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.
That will only matter if companies don't train customers to expect frequent upgrade cycles. It's worked for consumer electronics, but there will be strain in previously "came with the house" objects. You'll need to sidestep people's habits, in the way that the microwave did, perhaps. And we're only worried about vendors going out of business because it's the early days and it's largely startups pushing the trend. Wit…
Are you arguing that frequent upgrade cycles are a good thing?
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#53I 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 know it is just an OS kernel and security is far more comprehensive than having a secure kernel, but this is an amazing start:
I'm surprised IoT conversations are still happening with Linux as a contender for the OS, let alone Windows.
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#54Earlier 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?
> 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? Correct. To simplify, imagine a diode on one side and a photodetector cell on the other. On a microcontroller, this would be an opto-isolator ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opto-isolator ). Of course, the higher levels of the OSI protocol you're using ne…
It's really not all that complicated.
You get a couple of these Ethernet to 100FX converters: http://antaira.com/products/media-converters/unmanaged-conve...
Then you hook them up with just one fibre strand (instead of the usual 2). You obviously can't use TCP over that since that requires a 2-way connection, but UDP works just fine. You'll probably want to wrap your data in some error correcting code, too.
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Department of Defense requires air gaps between red and black[1] networks, but blackers[2] exist that can tunnel red traffic over block networks.
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#56I 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 som…
How well would you say that Tesla is coping with this as a company? For that matter, what about Apple?
Apple just kind of assumes that you have the latest shiny, because why wouldn't you? This induces a phenomenon I call the Apple Turnover: when a software update aimed at new Apple things comes out and makes your old Apple thing not run so good anymore. Sluggish iPhones are the hallmark example today, but I was bitten badly by this in the mid-2000s when Panther would no longer compile C++ files. You see, one of Apple's OS updates for Panther came with Tiger's libstdc++, which used the new Itanium ABI. This was so Xcode for Tiger could compile programs to run on Panther, but without heroic efforts to set up compiler flags in every package you built to link against the old static libstdc++, compiling on Panther would link against the new libstdc++ by default and fail horribly, rendering C++ code uncompilable. (Deleting or renaming the new libstdc++ was not an option; it was a heavily depended on system component and I think even the header files were changed for the new library.) And a lot of stuff depended on C++, including C-API stuff like SDL. And Apple did fuck all to fix it.
So if you buy a shiny Apple toy, your choices are to commit to upgrading early in the new product cycle or risk an Apple Turnover rendering your purchase, if not useless, then with degraded functionality even relative to the same device when you bought it.
And the pisser is during the 80s and 90s, Apple gear was legendary for running well, and being supported, many years if not more than a decade after its purchase date.
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
You normally use such a scheme to pass data from the more critical to the less critical system. For example in nuclear power plants (that's where I know this scheme from) your low-safety systems can use data acquired by a highly safety relevant system (e.g. to display the pressure, temperature and power generation of the reactor core without being able to influence the safety systems that primarily acquired the values).
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#58Earlier 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.
Roughly OT: I have yet to have seen anything that makes me look forward to the IoT, and when I talk to the voices of vendors in my head I'm basically telling them "Stay out of my refrigerator, my furnace, my toilet and my smart doorlock that I'll never have." I just don't feel that anything relevant to the IoT is missing from my life. At all.
I can see "Check if I left the stove on and turn it off remotely" being a neat thing to have. But not neat enough to let a 10 year old appliance with no software updates and the capability to burn my house down be accessible to the internet.
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#59Is this what an actual cyberattack / cyberwar looks like? Imagine how much money is being lost right now as a result of this disruption. Somewhere hackers are popping champagne.
UAL stock took a $1 nosedive (hah) at 10am.
Re: All United Flights Grounded Due to Mysterious Problem
#60Earlier 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.
Roughly OT: I have yet to have seen anything that makes me look forward to the IoT, and when I talk to the voices of vendors in my head I'm basically telling them "Stay out of my refrigerator, my furnace, my toilet and my smart doorlock that I'll never have." I just don't feel that anything relevant to the IoT is missing from my life. At all.
I would say only the DIY part of the IoT is something to look forward to. When all it takes is $20 and a few lines of Lua to set up a display, some sensors etc. that's connected either to the actual internet or just your private wifi, that's actually a cool thing. Basically any time you've thought "Hey, I could use an RPi and automate this.. Nah, they're too big and expensive."