> If a car can receive OTA updates it can receive OTA hacks, no passenger in car required.
True, but that seems like a different threat model—the title is "Can a Passenger Hack an Airplane?", so I was taking the analogue to be "Can a Passenger Hack a Car?" Specifically, the response
> wow, I came here to comment that of course passengers can't hack an airplane, at least in the sense of taking control of it, because there's no way that anyone with half a brain wouldn't have an absolute air gap between the passenger facing systems and the flight control systems.
I have a rust bucket, but it seems that a lot of newer models use bluetooth to pair phones with cars. I assume that car manufacturers have baked in at least some level of security to prevent every nearby rando from hijacking the car with bluetooth, but you know what they say about assumptions. And if the call is coming from inside the car (aka every passenger wants to play a different song and they all bombard the infotainment system with requests), are you just SOL?
But more prone to infotainment saturating the CAN bus. Infotainment can be hacked using the 5G connection facilities which no-one takes seriously. The CAN bus also drives the brakes.
I wouldn’t say it’s as easy as cutting the brake cables in 1950, but it’s as efficient.
Service brakes were typically hydraulic long before 1950. Only parking brakes would have been cable operated on the overwhelming majority of cars on the road in 1950 (or since).
