Monday, February 26, 2007
How to Crash an IFE system
Seriously, people! Stop sending me this link. Blogger report about How to crash an in-flight entertainment system. The article details a bug in the upper bound of a 1 byte signed integer within a carrier's Tetris game.
I boldly pressed the + button once more. Suddenly, the display now flashes -128 just for an instant and then poof...screen goes black. Poof...screen of the person next to me goes black. Screens in front of me and behind me go black. The entire plane entertainment system goes down...
No clue about what carrier, who the IFE manufacturer is, or if the bug is still exploitable.
¶ 7:25 AM
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There are only three major manufacturers of IFE. One of them has not yet sold any on-demand systems to a US-based carrier, leaving Rockwell-Collins or Panasonic as the likely supplier. Vegas to Orlando flight in 2005 with on-demand system makes me think it was likely a Song flight, which is Panasonic (formerly branded as Matsushita) hardware.
Games are provided by a third party, and are usually tested as part of the system, but are not necessarily tested for every possible exception, since the IFE manufacturer isn't the supplier. Good or bad, it is what it is. We have enough on our plate making all our own software work - and it is a whole lot of software that goes into a modern IFE system.
BTW, you'll find IFE systems run under Linux because of licensing fee and performance issues, as well as the need to incorporate specific hardware drivers.
- An IFE Engineer
Games are provided by a third party, and are usually tested as part of the system, but are not necessarily tested for every possible exception, since the IFE manufacturer isn't the supplier. Good or bad, it is what it is. We have enough on our plate making all our own software work - and it is a whole lot of software that goes into a modern IFE system.
BTW, you'll find IFE systems run under Linux because of licensing fee and performance issues, as well as the need to incorporate specific hardware drivers.
- An IFE Engineer
# posted by 
: 5:26 AM
: 5:26 AM
WHo is the third, You said there are three IFE manufacturers and only two have sold to USA companyies. Who is the third.
# posted by : 7:34 AM
: 7:34 AM
Manufacturers of IFE systems include Panasonic Avionics Corporation, Thales Group, Rockwell Collins, LiveTV, and TEAC Aerospace.
# posted by : 1:19 AM
: 1:19 AM
Additional IFE Companies: Thompson Aerospace, Audio International, Honeywell/Baker (legacy system support), IMS, Lumexis, IFPL, 20 BisJet start-ups, etc...
Live TV is actually a sub supplier of Panasonic. They do not have a stand alone IFE system. Aircell has a similar product and is also a subvender - AirShow has a small system (may have been mothballed at this point), but primary sale moving map software and boxes to Thales and PAC.
The issue has been found by the game/GUI mfg and has fixed the issue.
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Live TV is actually a sub supplier of Panasonic. They do not have a stand alone IFE system. Aircell has a similar product and is also a subvender - AirShow has a small system (may have been mothballed at this point), but primary sale moving map software and boxes to Thales and PAC.
The issue has been found by the game/GUI mfg and has fixed the issue.
# posted by : 1:48 PM
: 1:48 PM<< Home