[SystemSafety] Hacking Avionics

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

The Black Hat conference was last week. For those who missed the theatre (I had rabbits to feed and
lawn to mow), there was a presentation by Reuben Santamarta, a consultant with the computer security
company IOActive, about hacking SATCOM devices, which was previewed by Reuters.

Two of the systems in which vulnerabilities were found are avionics: the Cobham Aviator 700 and 700D
kit. A Black Hat reviewer purporting to make a big deal of it in the Reuters article. I have also
read some (further) naive and uninformed commentary in some mailing lists.

It seems to me - and the vendor and implicitly the airworthiness regulators - to be inconsequential.
I put my evaluation, along with links to airworthiness regulations and their definitions, at
http://www.abnormaldistribution.org/2014/08/14/security-vulnerabilities-in-commercial-aircraft-satcom-kit/

PBL

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de