Christiaan008
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 11 months, 2015–2026
50:56 · 227K views · Nov 21, 2012
A DEF CON 20 talk by RenderMan on the security weaknesses of ADS-B, the unencrypted, unauthenticated aircraft tracking broadcast. It shows how easily the data can be spoofed and what that means for security designed in too late.
Cited whenever aviation or vehicle communication security comes up, as the standard demonstration that ADS-B is naively designed and trivially spoofable.
11 comments from Hacker News
You may find this interesting 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.
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: this video
DEFCON 20: Hacker + Airplanes = No Good Can Come Of This this video Good watch if you wanna see how naively designed the whole thing is.
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: this video
In the airplane case, it's possible today: 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