In recent weeks, Roberts gave media interviews in which he discussed airline system vulnerabilities. "Quite simply put, we can theorize on how to turn the engines off at 35,000 feet and not have any of those damn flashing lights go off in the cockpit," he told Fox News. Roberts also told CNN he was able to connect to a box under his seat at least a dozen times to view data from the aircraft's engines, fuel and flight-management systems.
Now we see.
Uniteds normal twitter monitoring turned up the fact that this fellow was in flight and tweeting; given those recent interviews, rather than understand any details of the situation, they simply put him into the “possible threat” category.
It’s quite easy to make sure passenger wifi and the planes computers can’t talk to each other, it’s called physical separation.
The airplanes’ computers do send data packets back and forth to ground, as we all learned from 9/11 investigations. But while these communications must happen, they are not http protocol and should not be, obviously.
Many people either don’t understand or refuse to admit that IP networking simply is not designed fundamentally with security in mind, quite simply because once a packet is in transit between its source and destination, neither end has any way of knowing or ensuring anything about monitoring or integrity at the lower levels of IP protocol. This is all done in higher levels of IP protocol using checksums, encryption, etc., thus it’s an ongoing challenge.
Physical separation I would think would be the only way to go with something like vehicles of any kind. A moving vehicle should not have its internal computing that controls the vehicle accessible to the internet. It’s the only way to guarantee that a vehicle that is operating won’t be hacked; it physically can’t be.
I don’t know if this is the case with airplanes; I always assumed it was, that any passenger communications was physically isolated from the planes systems and the plane’s systems were not accessible on the internet through normal protocols.
If it is physically separate, and planes are not “hackable”, it may well be that the public is intentionally being made afraid by stories like this, when there is nothing to fear.