Wouldn't that be great. You could get at google earth as a passenger and use it's "Fly to" function - quite literally!

They say:

'...although data can pass between the two networks, protections already in place make sure that passenger internet services are blocked from accessing maintenance data or the navigation system "under any circumstance"'

I say:

Prove it. Make the whole system available to the Black Hat conference folks for a few months and then see if this is really 'unbreakable', unlike some well known adverts in the past...

No firewall is better than a few cm of air!

that as with all OS (remember the fuss over the NSA-KEY allegedly lurking in Windows a few years back? http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/09/05/microsoft_collaborating_with_us_spymasters/) that there will be a back door to allow IMF agents upon receiving their brief to then re-route the plane whilst in flight so they can complete their mission on time.

Whilst sodding up the travel plans of the public of course.

And if you beleive rumours that make it to the press about crew behaviour, no firewall to stop passenger interference will stop the stewardess installing Doom to play with the flight crew on "their" side of the firewall....

If the black box doesnt do a full backup of all systems data (and I think they only do limited stuff relating to the "mechanicals", correct me if I am wrong), the first time one of these things smacks into a mountainside, there will be calls for them all to be grounded and re-wired. I dont let my car "IT stuff" (other than OEM) interfere with the safety bits, I would be even more worried about flying in something this complex.

There's probably a very simple answer to this, but if current planes have absolutely no connection between navigation and entertainment systems, how do SkyMap channels work? According to http://www.virgin-atlantic.com/en/gb/whatsonboard/inflightentertainment/index.jsp, theirs uses "the very same navigational equipment employed on the flight deck"

Wrong plane. Although similarly massive the 787 and the A380 are two entirely different planes.

Isn't this flight sim accurate....

Homer mode on

plane goes up, plane goes down,

plane goes up, plane goes down

Homer mode off

"The NSA is suspected of everything from the overthrow of foreign governments to negotiating the repatriation of hostages abducted by aliens." .... http://www.theregister.co.uk/1999/09/05/microsoft_collaborating_with_us_spymasters/

IT would be XXXXstreamly lucrative for them* to set up/register alien governments, especially with all that new fangled, entangling NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActivity ... Astute Sub-Atomic Quantum Communications.

QuITe Priceless and worth a Mint/Absolute Fortune ........ which effectively, logical, would really mean that it would be practically free to any who paid the Piper for ITs Tunes given what IT is capable of doing.

* With them being anyone with the necessary CyberIntelAIgents for who is to say that the NSA are not [now] being Programmed and Program-led? Although that would be beautifully, plausibly deniable even though the thought is shared with them here. What one can be sure of though is that if IT is thought a Better Beta Systems Program, they'll be Generous to a FailSafe Fault to justify Input Proxy to Leading Roles.

And the Spooky thing is, is that if they don't they will lose IT to whoever does. An Analytical Failure of Omission due to Systemic Weakness and AI Blind Faith.

"......although data can pass between the two networks, protections already in place......."

'cos we all know that every successful attack has been in situations where there is no authentication, firewall or other protective system between the hacker and his target, don't we?

"Take this plane to Tehran! On second thoughts, don't bother, I'll do it myself".

or valid reason to have passengers laptops linked, even remotely, to an airlines main navigation control system... period! This is totally insane. How many "unbreakable" protocols, apps, databases, networks, etc have been created up to this point? The answer is NONE. If it's related in any way to computers and networks it most certainly is breakable and prone to human error. How many times have we heard of government databases being broken into? Are they not "state of the art technology"? It's been shown time and time again that any network can be breached and messed around with. It's bad enough that the Net has proven it ISN'T safe and never will be no matter how hard IT tries. It's like everything else man made..... breakable and flawed. So now we put multiple lives at risk for what........?? This is total and complete insanity.

Clearly the networks should have been kept separate. What did Boeing do, outsource the design?

My guess, the program/project manager knew how to push paper, but knew nothing of network architecture or design.

Fight sim game?

Flight sim game? (typo correction)

...will still be a broken wing or something no-one though about rather than a leaky firewall. One would need to know more about why the networks were connected in the first place, but this is not particularly more disquieting than a publicly accessible Milnet. Maybe the just pass SNMP traps from the inside to the outside? Who knows.

So, forum experts... pack up your expert indignation, nothing to see here.

"How many times have we heard of government databases being broken into?"

No need. They leave them unsecured on laptops in cars, on memory sticks in libraries, and mail them to corporations in foreign countries.

In-flight moving maps are connected - but I would suspect (although not an expert) that it is a one way (out) data feed to the map software. Quite why the new craft need to be any different and linked to passenger side is beyond me although the story doesn't quite go in depth and say what is linked, for why, and how so I will reserve my judgement but I will be taking my MS force feedback joystick to plug into the a/c just in case :)

I believe he was referring to a cartoon about the A380 which proves fitting in this case.

In any case, the two aircraft are not similarly massive - the A380 being of almost twice the mass of the 787.

Since taking a pen-knife onto one of their planes is now more difficult than it used to be following 9/11 as a result of heightened airport security, it seems that Boeing has endeavoured to resolve this dilemma so that a terrorist doesn't even need to get out of their passenger seat in order to hijack/sabotage one of their aircraft any more.

Maybe all that will be required is a lap-top computer to hack into the on-board network, seize control of the aircraft and fly it into the nearest highly populated building. Or perhaps simply by causing the network that manages the entertainment system (and conveniently the aircraft's navigation controls) to crash, the plane will obligingly drop like a stone from the sky somewhere in the vicinity of the White House.

Good job Boeing! After 9/11 it's nice to know that you take security seriously.

... it would be interesting if the plane was being actually hijacked by Al Qaeda or something in the genre, the pilots were killed and the airplane's cockpit destroyed (cockpits don´t react well to bullets, I guess. Russian nuclear submarines surely don´t). Just fire up your Flight Simulator, log in with stewardess (er flight attendant, right?) priviileges, and guide the plane to an emergency landing anywhere. Of course, after the terrorists were disabled...

That would be quite a movie, if it wasn´t already been done before.

Please, as someone else said, the better firewall still is a few inches of air... and no wireless access, please!

This was the cartoon (sorry can't find English version)

http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/03/01/gross.jpg

The article reminded me of it and I thought quite apt

and yes it was an A310 not an A380 in cartoon

As mentioned, I assume that all Skymap systems have a feed from the aircraft positioning to the entertainment system. There are two other ways they could work: use a dedicated GPS, or (scodier) have the system programmed with flight number and a route map, and have the pilots occasionally update the ETA. That wouldn't show you where you were in the hold over Berkshire, though.

There are a few other touch points. If the ent system uses satcom, it's reasonable that it might share this with navigation/telemetry functions. It's also possible that the same physical wiring is used for entertainment and other functions.

Really it's just a question of ensuring that the division is maintained. Anything mission critical has to be developed and audited/tested to a high level (it doesn't run on a commercial OS, for instance). I reckon the report (the link is broken so I can't read it) is just flagging that everything needs to be checked and tested.

http://www.heise.de/ct/schlagseite/03/01/gross.jpg

(It's in German, but you can figure it out easily enough)

It's been a couple of months since I read the systems manual for 787 (given current delays, learning to drive the thing has lost the urgency!), but while I think some of the concepts didn't look brilliant on paper I don't think anyone would get far trying to get into the avionics from a cabin facing system.

Much of the feature set of the aircraft does smack of the design team throwing every idea they could come up with at the thing, in some cases ending up with features apparently added just because they could be! Plus they've moved from the traditional avionics concept to something more familiar in the commercial world i.e. file servers, processing servers, and switched networks.

As far as the computers goes, I seem to remember that on top of the avionics RTOS, there are also instances of Linux in there, and even XP (!!) as part of the Electronic Flight Bag modules (not a concern though, it's only used for the HMI, and the aircraft data exchange is handled via another OS (Linux?) on an independent CPU i.e. XP talks to Linux, Linux talks to aircraft. So Microsoft gets nowhere near the actual avionics).

I think where most of the reported concern comes from the way the back end hardware is managed.

The actual aircraft avionics networks run CDN (ARINC 664), over fibre. This is basically the same thing as used by Airbus on the A380 (AFDX), though in that case traditional cables are used instead of fibre. While this is derived from Ethernet it isn't the kind of thing you'd easily patch into or upset with a laptop. The cabin applications network is for the most part independent from this (dedicated cables, different protocols), with interconnection only where required to share common hardware platforms or for data exchange.

The networks do come together in the core network and the Common Computing Resource. The former is the shared part of the aircraft networks, and incorporates all the network switching required to interlink various subsystem networks. The latter is the computing resource for the avionics and other systems, and can basically be considered as a form of blade server. The concept is that all the avionics processing runs on a common hardware platform, with the various systems being allocated to modules as required. This makes spares and support easier, and allows simple fail over during operation. In the worst case complete failure is handled by dual redundancy of the complete CCR, networks etc. etc., and beyond this low capability fail-safe modes in individual subsystems e.g. in the case of complete failure of the networks.

Anyway, I know I didn't think much of the idea of all this concentrated and connected hardware when I first saw it, especially given there are wireless networks and cabin accessible networks involved.

But it should be remembered that the way the system is built, with isolation and firewalls, should be adequate - after all, the different networks are only linked in that they share a switching platform at one point, and run different protocols and it's quite possible to ensure that only specific, formatted packets can be transferred between specific points, and even then only in one direction. I would assume that there isn't actually any flow from one network directly to another, but that certain systems have a link to the avionics net and also a dedicated port for any outputs to other networks e.g. cabin systems or maintenance.

Considering that the hardware is all custom, the operating system is custom, the critical networks use a robust avionics network protocol and that the concept that someone might cause a problem (deliberately or otherwise) is a fairly basic one - let's face it, in theory a faulty IFE system could cause just as many problems on the network! - I don't think there was ever any real likelihood of a problem as it's been considered at a low level from day 1, for example in the design of the network protocol. When you have complete control you can build the systems to do specific jobs, and no more, which makes them slightly more robust than a general purpose operating system with a fully featured network stack.

Not that I'd really want to go on a 787 for the first 12 months after entry into service, or live under a flight path: there are just too many things that 'might' go wrong given how many of the concepts are new. I'm yet to be convinced that composite fuselage tube is completely safe on an aircraft this size...

If the networks are not physically separated this leaves the eventuality of denial of service attacks.

Just get the first commercial passenger flight with most of the passengers using the internet and the plane will fall out of the sky.