When I think about airlines I think about a lot of things but I don’t think of high tech. That isn’t very realistic as jet engines\u00a0are pretty high tech devices and the ability to book reservations over the internet is high tech – simply search by date and city and presto you can select (and pay for) flight within minutes.<\/p>\n
It is a pretty clever but all of this “internet access” is just a thin layer over the real backbone of the airlines. \u00a0The airlines and travel agencies have had their own legacy system in place to allow for booking of flights. \u00a0This system, a so called\u00a0global distribution system, created to coordinate between the airlines and the travel agencies to prevent selling a seat twice.<\/p>\n
However, the older the system the less likely it is to have been programmed to withstand a concentrated external attack by a dedicated attacker.<\/p>\n
The neat thing about the internet age is not only the various technologies that exist but also the various white hat hacker groups that exist to investigate these technologies and cast light on these important issues. \u00a0One of the oldest such groups involved in this is the chaos computer club<\/a>\u00a0which has existed since the early eighties.<\/p>\n The chaos computer club does some amazing clarifications of the weaknesses that they investigated. \u00a0A few months ago, they had a\u00a0Karsten Nohl give a speech about the security or lack of security of this very important system for anyone who flys.<\/p>\n This speech is both an amazing speech on the\u00a0clarity of how the system works but terrifying how poorly such an important system is protected.<\/p>\n