Hacker News Reader

Comment by jimrandomh | Hacker News Reader

Not true. Cryptography does work.

Cryptography works, but the implementations are frequently flawed.

Plus, things like this introduce systemic risk where an adversary can take over multiple aircraft simultaneously, or at least render them all inert midair.

At the scale of unique UAVs it is even possible to use one time pad loads before each mission from a codeplug. I can assure you that DoD "type 1" crypto does work.

If remote controlled aircraft are a problem then basically anything on a network is a problem. Pretty sure nuclear power stations, missile silos, satellites, dams, darn near everything has a remote controlling and monitoring element these days. You could just shut down a whole country.

We are going to have a very sorry series of tragedies if that doesn't change. Remote monitoring is fine, remote control is not. At least, not for things like nuclear power, weapons systems, vehicles that can drive very fast, etc

Remote control of assets is not going to go away, we will need to adapt as an industry to produce secure systems.

Secure remote control requires secure systems, which in turn requires secure humans, and we will never solve this last requirement.

The way around this is by preventing systemic attacks. Analogous is how paper voting—while vulnerable to things like vote stuffing—isn't susceptible to the systemic problems that electronic voting typically is.

I'd say secure systems need to be based on the assumption of insecure humans. Nothing is absolute in security but we definitely should start the analysis expecting people to behave incorrectly and insecurely. This is not a new problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byzantine_fault_tolerance

If Stuxnet taught us anything, you’re not wrong.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com