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DEFCON 20: Hacker + Airplanes = No Good Can Come Of This

Christiaan008

73K subscribers • 19 videos on Hallway

YouTube
  • Recommended by 4 people: 3 on Hacker News and 1 in engineering communities.
  • A classic. People kept recommending it from 2014 to 2019.
  • Presented by Brad Haines

Intermediate. Assumes working knowledge.

226K views13 years ago4 recommendations

SecuritySystems programmingExploits and vulnerabilitiesNetworking and protocolsEmbedded systems

Brad Haines explains the security vulnerabilities of the unencrypted and unauthenticated ADS-B aircraft tracking system.

Speaker: RENDERMAN CHIEF RESEARCHER What happens when a hacker gets bored and starts looking at an aircraft tracking systems? This talk will look at ADS-B (Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast), a common technology installed or being installed on a vast majority of commercial airliners that involves an unencrypted and unauthenticated radio broadcast. This technology has some interesting features and weaknesses that are a useful lesson in failures when security is not built in from the beginning. This talk constitutes a work in progress and hopes to spur more research and investigation into this field. Brad Haines (RenderMan) CISSP, is a Whitehat by trade, Blackhat by fashion. A very visible and well known member of the wardriving and hacker community, he does whatever he can to learn how things work, how to make them better and to teach people the same. A firm believer in the hacker ethic of openness, sharing, and collaboration. Never afraid to try something new, he can usually be found taking unnecessary risks for the sake of the experience. Twitter: @ihackedwhat For more information visit: bit.ly/defcon20_information To download the video visit: bit.ly/defcon20_videos Playlist DEFCON 20: bit.ly/defcon20_playlist

Why it's here

4 people recommend this, 1 disputes it

What people say. Recommended as a classic demonstration of how easily unencrypted aviation tracking data can be spoofed.

arma26on Hacker News • Recommends

On “FAA Poised to Take on Role as Traffic Cop for Space”

DEFCON 20: Hacker + Airplanes = No Good Can Come Of This link to this video Good watch if you wanna see how naively designed the whole thing is.

etimbergon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Killing car privacy by federal mandate”

This reminds me of the complete lack of security in ADS-B transmissions from aircraft. See an interesting DefCon talk from a few years ago: link to this video

wiseleoon Hacker News • Recommends

On “Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems”

You may find this interesting link to this video in particular about the bleed of ATSB data from virtual world into real world. It's a semi-hypothetical Defcon presentation on insecure wireless communications directly with the aircraft.

u/The-Motive-Forcein r/netsec • Recommends

In light of the MH370 fiasco, here's a Defcon presentation on hacking aircraft tracking systems

jsjohnston Hacker News • Disputes

On “31 years later, we found the flight recorders”

Except ADS-B is a shit show. Watch this video 1 and tell me if you really want to still trust it over radar. 1 link to this video

tyhoon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Clearing the Air on Wi-Fi Software Updates”

But when the day comes that SDR's which can transmit from 0-10GHz are in every device you buy, all the FCC will be able to do is rubber stamp these devices as 0-10GHz SDR's, which are actually very capable of severe interference: link to this video The reason they want to regulate the software is because regulating the hardware is soon not going to be sufficient. Hopefully one day we can use extreme versions of beam forming (e.g. the pCell) to replace the need for RF regulations and switch to space based multiplexing as opposed to frequency based multiplexing.

seanp2k2on Hacker News • Mentions

On “Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on April 11”

In the airplane case, it's possible today: link to this video And link TL;DR you simulate a bunch of other planes in close proximity and the auto-pilot freaks out and tries to avoid them. As the second talk explains, the pilots would definitely notice and switch autopilot off. This is why IMO it's very important to not take ultimate control away from humans in cars. I would personally never buy one of the Google (or any other) self-driving models with no controls. It already freaks me out that many cars are drive-by-wire (for the accelerator), and now even steer-by-wire: link #noThankYouPlease

kefkaon Hacker News • Mentions

On “Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars”

I get smatterings of your comments of the similar old idea of "Can you imagine a mechanical horse carriage where all 4 hooves moved in unison?! Balderdash, I must say. There's no way 4 legs could ever move that fast and that synchronized! It'll never happen. Now, Jeeves, go ready my carriage. We're going to meet a weird entrepreneur by the name of Henry Ford." You're right. With old "state of the art", and yes I do say old, having 100+ planes in a square mile would be very trying. But we're talking of no encryption, no authentication, no anti-jamming, no anything really. And that's from a 2012 presentation at Defcon: link to this video

hxxxxon Hacker News • Mentions

On “A plane flying over Germany drawing a Christmas tree”

That's already been demonstrated at defcon. Here's Brad Haines tricking open source flight tracking software into displaying YOURMOM, a connecting flight with the San Francisco International air control tower. Demonstrated in safe conditions in a faraday cage, of course. link to this video

crankylinuxuseron Hacker News • Mentions

On “Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Could Replace Traffic Lights, Shorten Commutes”

Ok. Lets play. link Take it from 300MHz-3.8GHz to 70MHz-6GHz link Buy some antennas for the freq's you want to RX/TX. Sniff or investigate the protocol. Cause wrecks and brake-checks and other bad things with cars. I guarantee this will be as bad as ADS-B : link to this video

MereIntereston Hacker News • Mentions

On “Air-Traffic Control Is in the Midst of a Major Change from Radar to GPS”

There was a talk at DEFCON about this in 2012 1. The main issue is a radar system gets its information from ground-based measurements, while a GPS system gets its information from air-based measurements that are later transmitted to the ground station. This means that those reports can be spoofed, or lied about, or absent entirely. link to this video

infthion Hacker News • Mentions

On “Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance”

There was this proof of concept in 2012: link to this video (IIUC they did not actually transmit data, just fed it directly into an ADS-B receiver, but transmitting would've been trivial at this point)