Causing incidents with in-flight entertainment systems

Some odd things have happened on airplanes recently. The voice on the PA system on an American Airlines flight was one of these. Before the airline put out a response, we were asked to speculate about how it might have happened. American then discovered that there was an issue with one of the PA...

747 Hackathon

As is probably clear from our blog and public talks aviation cyber security is an area of huge interest to us. Some of us are also light aircraft pilots, so the crossover of two of our loves makes for some fascinating research. Over the last few years we’ve managed to get access to several...

Getting a persistent shell on a 747 IFE

TL:DR The Coronavirus pandemic has hit the airline industry hard. One sad consequence was early retirement of most of the 747 passenger fleet. This does however create opportunities for aviation security research, as airframes are parked up before parting out in breakers yards. This 747 was flyin...

The Latest in Creepy Spyware

The Nest home alarm system shipped with a secret microphone, which -- according to the company -- was only an accidental secret: On Tuesday, a Google spokesperson told Business Insider the company had made an "error." "The on-device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have bee...

British Airways Entertainment System Buffer Overflow Vulnerability

The British Airways Entertainment System is an in-flight audio-visual entertainment system. A security vulnerability exists in the British Airways Entertainment System installed on Boeing 777-36NER and other aircraft, which arises from a program that does not prevent the USB charge/digit transfer...

Panasonic, IOActive Clash on Vulnerability Report

Panasonic Avionics has pushed back against research released Tuesday by IOActive suggesting that in-flight entertainment system firmware used by more than a dozen airlines contains vulnerabilities that allow a local attacker to manipulate data displayed to passengers, or put their personal data a...

Hacker Demonstrates How Easy In-flight Entertainment System Can Be Hacked

Next time when you hear an announcement in the flight, “Ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking…," the chances are that the announcement is coming from a hacker controlling your flight. Dangerous vulnerabilities in an in-flight entertainment system used by the leading airlines,...

FBI: Banned Security Researcher Admitted to Hacking Plane In-Flight

A security researcher who was pulled out from a United Airlines flight last month had previously admitted to Federal Bureau of Investigation FBI that he had taken control of an airplane and made it fly briefly sideways. Chris Roberts, the founder of One World Labs, was recently detained, question...