PCspooF: New Vulnerability Affects Networking Tech Used by Spacecraft and Aircraft
Nov 15, 2022
Credit: Marina Minkin A novel attack method has been disclosed against a crucial piece of technology called time-triggered ethernet ( TTE ) that's used in safety-critical infrastructure, potentially causing the failure of systems powering spacecraft and aircraft. Dubbed PCspooF by a group of academics and researchers from the University of Michigan , the University of Pennsylvania, and the NASA Johnson Space Center, the technique is designed to break TTE's security guarantees and induce TTE devices to lose synchronization for up to a second, a behavior that can even lead to uncontrolled maneuvers in spaceflight missions and threaten crew safety. TTE is one among the networking technologies that's part of what's called a mixed-criticality network wherein traffic with different timing and faults tolerance requirements coexist in the same physical network. This means that both critical devices, which, say, enable vehicle control, and non-critical devices, w...
