A Weapon That Clears Security

Pilots don’t carry paper anymore. The charts, the takeoff numbers, the weather, the entire pre-flight briefing, all of it sits on a tablet now, and that tablet pulls what it needs over ordinary Wi-Fi, the same kind you’ve got at home. The flight deck has a locked door, but the radio signal going in and out of it doesn’t stop at that door. That’s the part nobody seems to have thought about.

So we tried it, and not on some tablet we set up ourselves, but on a real airline-issued Electronic Flight Bag in a line pilot’s hands, loaded with the briefing for an actual scheduled flight. Next to it on the table we put a phone that cost fifty dollars.

It took seconds. Then the tablet put a message up on screen for the crew, in its own words, about what it had just lost. What that message said, and what we did to the tablet afterwards, is in the full article.

The flight bag wasn’t the only thing we did from that one seat. We took an entire network offline and held it there. We filled the air with networks that don’t exist, carrying names a passenger would expect to see, until picking out the real one became impossible, and we got a device to join us instead of the network it thought it was joining. What we could see from the moment it did is the part an airline should be worried about.

Then there are the headphones, which are their own chapter. Wireless earbuds are built to trust a phone that comes near them, and a flaw in the way that trust works means a great many of them will accept almost any phone, not just their owner’s. What somebody can do to you once they’re inside your headphones goes a long way past playing loud noises at you.

Here’s the part that should stop you. All of that came off an LG Nexus 5, a phone from 2013. It costs about fifty dollars today, looks like something that’s been sitting in a drawer for a decade, and it goes through airport security in a pocket every single time, because nobody looks at a phone and sees a weapon. Security will take your nail scissors away and won’t allow a badminton racquet into the cabin, and this walks straight through.

What makes it possible is that the radios inside a phone were never limited to the job they were sold for. The Wi-Fi and Bluetooth chips in your pocket are capable of reaching the people sitting around you instead of your music. On the ground that’s a risk you can walk away from, but at 35,000 feet there are a few hundred people sitting shoulder to shoulder for hours sharing the same airwaves, and not one of them can step out of range.

None of this even has to work for a flight to suffer, which is the strangest part of all. In January, a passenger named his hotspot “I have a bomb”; a crew member spotted it, and an A321 carrying 148 people declared an emergency, was met by a NATO fighter escort, and was searched in Barcelona. In May, a Bluetooth device called “BOMB” turned a United flight back over the Atlantic, and it belonged to a teenager.

Both of those were jokes. Somebody typed a word and hundreds of people paid for it. The article is about what that same seat looks like when the person sitting in it actually knows what he’s doing.

Read the full article: https://cyviation.aero/a-weapon-that-clears-security/