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Airport Security Silliness
Nov. 10th, 2005 01:31 pmDuring a flight from New Zealand to Australia, I was selected for random security screening. They wanted me to power up all my electronic devices (including my laptop), of which there were many. In addition, they asked mt to load "Microsoft Word or something similar" on my laptop to show it was real. While waiting on everything to boot, we were chatting, and the security guys mentioned that they were having to do this because they'd been told of a threat that terrorists could use a laptop computer to deliberately interfere with the navigation and communication systems on a plane.
I just gave them the demonstration (albeit with OpenOffice 1.1, since my laptop runs Gentoo Linux) and went on, as telling them all of this would do no good and possibly delay my travel for no good reason, but I was thinking the following:
Is that threat remotely credible? First of all, are there any navigation systems on a plane that are critical? I would hope there aren't. Think about it -- say you could interfere with the navigation systems, to screw up GPS and autopilot. To my knowledge, the autopilot is not really capable of causing the plane to do some sort of unrecoverable maneuver... rather, it can set a heading and altitude desired, and then automatically makes corrections at a steady pace to achieve and maintain that heading and altitude. It seems that if it were compromised and decided to aim, say, straight down, the pilots would have plenty of time to simply switch it off and fly the plane the old-fashioned way.
Second, a laptop computer is only capable of transmitting on the 2.4 GHz band (5 GHz band if it has an 802.11a card, but those are rare.) No critical system on an airplane could possibly use this band, considering as it's nearly unregulated spectrum -- anyone is allowed to transmit on it, subject to a transmit power limitation (to keep you from jamming everybody else.) If the plane used these frequencies, it would be subject to interference from everything.
So any laptop capable of carrying out this likely-nonexistent attack would need to have custom hardware on it. Not necessarily very custom -- modifying a laptop's wireless card to transmit on an alternate frequency would actually be quite easy so long as you only need it to transmit on one frequency -- but certainly not out-of-box computer parts. This custom hardware is the actual threat agent -- if the attack exists, this is what the screeners are looking for. This could be installed in any standard computer.
And their manner of looking for it is... to make me load a word processor. There is no reason that attackers could not load the custom hardware onto a perfectly normal, everyday computer, right along with Microsoft Word! My laptop is primarily a security workstation; I've never even used the word processor I loaded up to show them (good thing it works -- if I'd shown them Emacs instead, they'd have arrested me for sure! :). However, they didn't notice that my word-processor-containing laptop also contained Nessus, Ethereal, airpwn, void11, macchanger, Kismet, aircrack, L0phtcrack, proxychains, and dozens of other hacking tools, because I didn't show them those. So why would terrorists say "Sure, here's Microsoft Word... oh, and while I'm at it, let me show you Terrorist Airplane Possessor 1.0!"?
So they're responding to a likely-nonexistent threat by screening for something entirely unrelated to the threat in question. I feel safer already!
Now, in their defense, if the threat is real, the threat agent is actually undetectable by any reasonable means; the only counter to it would be to forbid all laptops, PDAs, cell phones, and other microprocessor-based devices from the cabin and baggage compartment of all aircraft. Nothing short of that would do anything to address the threat.
I just gave them the demonstration (albeit with OpenOffice 1.1, since my laptop runs Gentoo Linux) and went on, as telling them all of this would do no good and possibly delay my travel for no good reason, but I was thinking the following:
Is that threat remotely credible? First of all, are there any navigation systems on a plane that are critical? I would hope there aren't. Think about it -- say you could interfere with the navigation systems, to screw up GPS and autopilot. To my knowledge, the autopilot is not really capable of causing the plane to do some sort of unrecoverable maneuver... rather, it can set a heading and altitude desired, and then automatically makes corrections at a steady pace to achieve and maintain that heading and altitude. It seems that if it were compromised and decided to aim, say, straight down, the pilots would have plenty of time to simply switch it off and fly the plane the old-fashioned way.
Second, a laptop computer is only capable of transmitting on the 2.4 GHz band (5 GHz band if it has an 802.11a card, but those are rare.) No critical system on an airplane could possibly use this band, considering as it's nearly unregulated spectrum -- anyone is allowed to transmit on it, subject to a transmit power limitation (to keep you from jamming everybody else.) If the plane used these frequencies, it would be subject to interference from everything.
So any laptop capable of carrying out this likely-nonexistent attack would need to have custom hardware on it. Not necessarily very custom -- modifying a laptop's wireless card to transmit on an alternate frequency would actually be quite easy so long as you only need it to transmit on one frequency -- but certainly not out-of-box computer parts. This custom hardware is the actual threat agent -- if the attack exists, this is what the screeners are looking for. This could be installed in any standard computer.
And their manner of looking for it is... to make me load a word processor. There is no reason that attackers could not load the custom hardware onto a perfectly normal, everyday computer, right along with Microsoft Word! My laptop is primarily a security workstation; I've never even used the word processor I loaded up to show them (good thing it works -- if I'd shown them Emacs instead, they'd have arrested me for sure! :). However, they didn't notice that my word-processor-containing laptop also contained Nessus, Ethereal, airpwn, void11, macchanger, Kismet, aircrack, L0phtcrack, proxychains, and dozens of other hacking tools, because I didn't show them those. So why would terrorists say "Sure, here's Microsoft Word... oh, and while I'm at it, let me show you Terrorist Airplane Possessor 1.0!"?
So they're responding to a likely-nonexistent threat by screening for something entirely unrelated to the threat in question. I feel safer already!
Now, in their defense, if the threat is real, the threat agent is actually undetectable by any reasonable means; the only counter to it would be to forbid all laptops, PDAs, cell phones, and other microprocessor-based devices from the cabin and baggage compartment of all aircraft. Nothing short of that would do anything to address the threat.
