DEFCON 20: Hacker + Airplanes = No Good Can Come Of This on HackerTube: recommended by 3 Hacker News commenters across 3 separate months, 2015–2026.
talk · intermediate · evergreen
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.
“Good watch if you wanna see how naively designed the whole thing is.”
11 Hacker News comments link this video. Each one links back to its thread.
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.
in “Wireless attacks on aircraft instrument landing systems” · View on HN
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
in “Killing car privacy by federal mandate” · View on HN
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.
in “FAA Poised to Take on Role as Traffic Cop for Space” · View on HN
There was this proof of concept in 2012: ▶ 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)
in “Somebody used spoofed ADSB signals to raster the meme of JD Vance” · View on HN
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. ▶ this video
in “Air-Traffic Control Is in the Midst of a Major Change from Radar to GPS” · View on HN
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 : ▶ this video
in “Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communication Could Replace Traffic Lights, Shorten Commutes” · View on HN
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. ▶ this video
in “A plane flying over Germany drawing a Christmas tree” · View on HN
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 “Larry Page is pouring millions into flying cars” · View on HN
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
in “Post-Mortem for Google Compute Engine’s Global Outage on April 11” · View on HN
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: ▶ 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.
in “Clearing the Air on Wi-Fi Software Updates” · View on HN
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] ▶ this video
in “31 years later, we found the flight recorders” · View on HN