I'm not talking about crashing the plane; I'm talking about crashing the IFE and me then having to sit through 10 hours of people who didn't bring a book.
Consequently the MD-11 has to land at high speed which makes it prone to catastrophic bounced landing like the 2 Fedex crashes.
Also, it was not produced for very long (compared to other aircrafts from Boeing or Airbus) and the fleet was either retired or converted to freighters quickly by airlines.
Even if it brought down the server, it's still nothing that the flight attendants can't solve by "turning it off and back on". This kind of fault happens all the time.
More interesting to me is the level of isolation of the network. Could someone exploit my phone through the in-flight WiFi, for example?
They cite inadequate safety standards and an overheating entertainment system.
It's easy to assume that government or the airlines wouldn't allow a faulty system to fly, but just like software it's those extreme edge cases that cause problems. Somehow I doubt hacking the entertainment system is comprehensively covered in the manufacturers safety check. It's probably a remote chance something bad would happen, but we can't say it's 0.
Half the bugs I notice in Chrome, I notice because my laptop fan starts running.
It's more likely for your plane to be hit by a falling unicorn than you being able to burn something up just by the power of `while (1)`.
The origin of Murphy's Law was in a rocket sled project. This guy was strapped onto a rocket sled, fired down a track, and then subjected to strong braking forces. "If anything can go wrong, it will go wrong" didn't just mean "stuff happens". It meant, "you have to either make it impossible for it to go wrong, or you have to find a way that, even if it does go wrong, this guy doesn't die". You can't just ignore the problem as unlikely. It will happen sooner or later.
You don't get to say "lots of things have faulty wiring". Things that can kill you had better not have faulty wiring, or had better be able to survive it if they do.
And read this before dropping your hair dryer in the bathtub: https://iaeimagazine.org/magazine/2010/01/16/the-illusion-of...
So yes, the aircraft is supposed to be robust against any trickery with the entertainment system. And indeed, it's 100% their fault for installing the wiring in a way that would overhead under load.
It's still pretty irresponsible to risk taking down the aircraft like that to check for a vulnerability!
The "rigorous protocol" is one-way hardware diodes. The telemetry simply cannot physically travel the other way.
Now, of course, there can always be mistakes. Certification is supposed to catch that, but of course, that isn't fool proof either.
Is that based on expectation, hope, or knowledge?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-178B#Software_level
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DO-254
By definition, it should have no impact on "safety, aircraft operation, or crew workload".
Mistakes can happen, but this is what is aimed for.
No, and the flaw you're busy exploiting also definitely shouldn't be there.
(Yes, the IFE is probably airgapped. Probably.)
At level E you only have to prove that there's no effects of faults on safety-critical systems, so it's more about the surrounding architecture than the software itself.
This mentality is where a lot of our current security problems come from, from IoT to critical infrastructure to ATMs, etc. Developers can't imagine someone would ever do anything nefarious on their "closed" network, so they don't bother doing more than cursory security. Then the internet shames anyone who tries to demonstrate how bad things really are.
(I work on IFE and avionics)
There is no physical way to write through those.