Cryptosmith

Bruce Schneier blogged on an interesting development: Israel Implementing IFF System for Commercial Aircraft.

No doubt operators will mistype PINs, and ground controllers will prompt them for corrections.

I’ll also be interested to see if the “duress signal” actually works in practice. In theory, the flight crew can type in either a “good” PIN which generates a “We’re OK” signal, or a “duress” PIN which signals “We’re hijacked.”

What happens if a ground controller sees a duress signal? Will the controller demand verbal confirmation? Will that increase risks to the flight crew? If so, then the flight crew isn’t going to use the duress signal.

It’s like the problem of silent alarms in banks. Employees won’t use the silent alarm if they think it decreases their chances of survival. Likewise, a flight crew isn’t going to generate a duress signal unless they’re convinced it will make things safer. They don’t want to risk having a ground controller ask, “Your transponder says you’ve been hijacked. Could you confirm, please?”

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