Just found this real world example of a state of the art piece of military gear vulnerible to hackers. The two points of entry appear to be a parts maintenance system, and a threat sharing system. https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/a25100725/f-35-vulnerability-hacked/
As long as you have any form of network, you have vulnerability. Putting networking on a combat ready system is a gamble. Absolutely worth it, but still a gamble.
The parts maintenance system should not be able to do anything to the combat systems other than falsely say 'system X is having issues'. At which point you restart that subprogram to clear the fault. And even more importantly, the parts maintenance system should not be accessible in flight. And the threat sharing system should be pretty massively encrypted.
Parts maintenance is about fucking up stocks and making you paranoid about what is faulty, low stock, over stocked and so on. It's is not about hacking the airplanes directly, it's more like Stuxnet, hitting related things. "Wait a sec, why are we getting 5 of these? We ordered 1!" Refurbished part is not completly checked, but paperwork says it is, some dumb guy just placed it in the wrong table, so in the box it goes... bang, it fails in use. You think you have 20, you need 15 for yesterday... "Fuck! What do you mean the warehouse only has 8? We need another 7 more NOW, where are the 12 missing ones?!" That part that get changed while still looking like new... yep, maybe it is not so old, you are just discarding them because the system said so. Or know deployment detatils (where, what kind of mission, etc) by how things are moving around. In the past details could give away important info, see German tank problem, now the systems can be tweaked to cause havoc too.
Shit, that's a problem without a computer to fuck things up. One of the missile techs was troubleshooting a tube, thing kept failing tests. He finally isolates it down to the specific board that is bad, goes to write up a Failure Report on it. It's a specific format, not the generic Naval Letter that I am responsible for. So the missile tech pulls up the last Failure Report they sent in to use for the format. about 30 seconds later, he's at my office all sorts of pissed off. The board serial number in the last Failure Report is exactly the same as the board that just failed!
Yes, without computers it happens. With computers it seems to happen more, in part due to extra complexity, but also due to blind faith (aka "Computer says no"). And now a third party can force extra errors, via those damn things called computers. A warehouse that count RFID tags needs someone to go and count the boxes visually. Not gonna happen in advance, only after multiple detected errors. A diagnosis tool that says everything is OK will need separate checks, but rarelly will get them before things go wrong. Stuxnet is one such case, it changed the rotation speed to damaging levels, but reported it was in the correct range, so why look? Yeah, that old stupid tech that likes to play with the tacho when he notices his "babies" are not singing correctly could... or maybe he was fired/retired. It's about the amount of errors, and the "range" required to cause them.
Impliying "waiting for humans"? Not anymore, modern hardware and software is so fucked in latency terms that humans can be the ones waiting regularly. You probably have heard John Carmack's "I can send an IP packet to Europe faster than I can send a pixel to the screen. How f’d up is that?" He explained somewhere how all the involved parts add too much delay. Now you don't need to be a fast typer, just hit the stupid modern app combined with a bad keyboard and silly screen, and you are the one waiting for the computer.
That’s a hilarious complaint to make. Because the not complaint rephrasing is: “When I’m setting up,this situation where I’m trying to draw these few thousand triangles with textures on them, in the same amount of time I can send an IP packet to Europe.” Or “The display buffer on this device updates every X ms, which happens to also be the expected travel time of an IP packet from here to Europe.” For God’s sake, I remember the old IBM PC clones and their “you’ve typed enough letters to fill the keyboard buffer, now I’m just going to give you useless beeping sounds so you’ll stop” behavior. That was 30-40 years ago. I don’t know what the appropriate old man lawn reference I should be making right now is, but so help me I’ll make you deal with Zip drives again if you don’t stop complaining.
Hilarious, but people see lag worse than before. Or maybe we expect better based in the "top speed" of things (ignoring it is separate from "response speed"). Current computers can have higher throughput, but some choices force "serious" delays (network is also getting hit too BTW, see Buffer Bloat), and that is without completly clumsy programming (this forum is "fast", others I know take some seconds to redraw, because they reinvented everything as "app", poorly). Too many things add delays, and in some cases, do it randomly which is even worse, as you can't adapt to a "big" but constant delay. Some old console games are hardly playable with modern screens (or emulators) because the old hardware assumed fast fixed response times. Another example, current digital television (broadcast signal) takes noticeable time to switch channels, analog did it nearly instant. Digital has to jump to a new freq, and then wait for the correct data to pass by, which can be many frames of wait (and some more if it has image processing for extra effects), analog just jumped and next frame was ready. Piloting drones with remote view? Again, you better use old analog tech for the glasses. Past wasn't perfect, you can keep your ZIP discs, but modern one has some severe fuckery, self inflected (and hidden by advertisment). Even big brands (Carmack was working for one when he said that, IIRC) are finding some choices weren't so good ("our VR is ready... OK, maybe next year you don't go sick so fast, promise"). At some point they may end redoing a big part of hardware and software with low latency, hard realtime, in mind. Or at least kick some sense into manufacturers so they go for more balanced products (I can't fit a 60" screen, "improve" something else).
