FAA Proposes New Cybersecurity Standards For Aircraft

Oh my gosh, you guys. No, that’s not how these things work. You’ve seen too much science fiction. Yes, it happens “all the time” on TV and in movies, but it doesn’t happen ever in the real world because it can’t.

Just because I might know where you keep your lawn mower doesn’t mean I could use that knowledge to hack into your car. Those are totally separate entities. The ADS-B transponder doesn’t send “data packets” to the autopilot. They are separate entities. No amount of ADS-B hacking could ever give a bad actor access to a flight control system or instrumentation data for primary flight display. The best a criminal could ever possibly do is screw up the transponder. There’s no networking of the systems beyond that device. These aren’t office computers and they aren’t on the internet.

The best a hacker could do would be to send a nonsense METAR or TAF to the airplane. The inputs and outputs between the avionics are defined parameters. The hacker can’t turn a METAR into a game of PAC-MAN. The display wouldn’t know what to do with PAC-MAN.

Yes, the GPS signal is easy to jam. No, it isn’t easy to spoof. Yes, there are some cases of spoofing in the world but they are not sophisticated. Mostly they spoof a single (frozen) position. They aren’t good for leading a vehicle (either air or ground) astray at your whim.