Want hackers to make 787 Dreamliner a flying nightmare?
Do you like airplanes? I know that. Take me to an airport terminal and I'll be glued to the glass watching them move on the tarmac. Big. Small. I love them all.
And not just from the outside. I love traveling by plane too. In fact, I have flown in almost all types of large short or long distance stars. From humongous A380s to reducing MD88s, I'm an experienced veteran of the air travel game.
I'm proud to be a kind of commercial aviation expert. Want to know my thoughts on Emirates A380? Nice service, but too few toilets for the number of passengers. United Airlines 777? Spartan interior with uncomfortable seats. South African Airways A340? Old aircraft with an antiquated entertainment system on one of the longest of long-haul routes (1[ads1]6+ hours from Johannesburg to JFK – I fly there a couple of times a year).
I've actually run them all – well, almost everyone. It's an airplane type I still haven't experienced: the Boeing 787 "Dreamliner." Despite many tricks in the world in recent years, I have yet to set foot in this marvel of carbon fiber technology. And given the new revelations about Boeing's unclear QA practice, I'm also not entirely sure I want to.
Now I have never been one who dreaded flying. In fact, I often sleep right through the take-off and landing sections on most flights. My peace of mind comes from the fact that commercial aircraft are some of the most well-developed and tested machines mankind has ever created, and that I am statistically much more likely to die across the street in New York City than to die in a plane crash.
However, this latest news about potential security exploits in the OS software that underlies many of the 787's on-board systems has prompted me to question my desire to add it to the list of buoys with flying aircraft frames. And the worst thing is that the shortcomings in question are so fundamental – failing to validate access to critical memory locations in Boe's customized version of VxWorks – that they point to a degree of laziness and / or incompetence that swirls this author's mind.
In a nutshell, they have built a plane around what sounds like the functional equivalent of Windows 3.0 (at least when it comes to the memory-process model between processes). Everything works just fine if all the code "plays well." But introduce something malicious and there is a (albeit slim) chance that it will jump from a non-critical to a critical system. And then heaven is (literally) the limit for what destruction an evil actor can trigger.
Do I overreact? May be. Maybe Boeing is right when they say that the exploits found by the people at IOActive are isolated to a non-critical network and thus cannot be used to compromise things like flight controls or flight sensors. But I would feel much better if, in addition to assuring us that there was no threat, they had also promised to rectify the identified errors directly. I mean, it's not like they have the best track record when it comes to aircraft software design.
The story is full of examples of catastrophic technical failures that should not be possible, yet managed to kill hundreds or even thousands of people. Here's hoping that the 787 is an exception to this trend, and that my long-awaited future trip aboard a "Dreamliner" doesn't give me my first real reason to fear flying.
Because at my age I need "beauty sleep" I can get!
Photo Credit: Thor Jorgen Udvang / Shutterstock
