> The headline, "People who know how radios work can affect systems that are based on radio." is so much less scary.
No, it is not. Nobody should be able to influence air traffic in that way just because she/he understands the transport layer.
After spending a night with a friend who just returned from a security audit (lots of cocktails were involved too) 15 years ago, I am convinced that the only reason we have not seen major disruptions yet is because of a pretty strict adherence to hacker ethics: one of the global "airport tech players" was deploying systems that used UDP for ground traffic control.... Having a bus or lorry use an active runway is just a single, malicious UDP packet away...
No, it is not. Nobody should be able to influence air traffic in that way just because she/he understands the transport layer.
After spending a night with a friend who just returned from a security audit (lots of cocktails were involved too) 15 years ago, I am convinced that the only reason we have not seen major disruptions yet is because of a pretty strict adherence to hacker ethics: one of the global "airport tech players" was deploying systems that used UDP for ground traffic control.... Having a bus or lorry use an active runway is just a single, malicious UDP packet away...