Common Online Security Fails In Pilot Training -

In this eye-opening talk at the DEF CON 27 TransportHax Village, Tarah Wheeler investigates severe privacy vulnerabilities and cybersecurity oversights embedded within civil aviation pilot training programs. She begins at 04:00 by recounting her personal experience learning to fly open-cockpit vintage aircraft like the de Havilland DH.60 Tiger Moth, noting the profound contrast between archaic mechanical flying and modern electronic aviation administration.

At 08:00, Tarah reviews federal aviation regulations, outlining the legal obligations pilots face regarding flight safety and passenger oversight. She reveals a critical data privacy failure at 12:00 within the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) Airmen Certification Registry, showing how public databases expose student and commercial pilots' full legal names, home street addresses, medical certificate tiers, and pilot ratings to anyone on the internet without authentication.

Tarah highlights the dangerous threat modeling implications at 16:00, illustrating how stalkers and hostile actors can correlate real-time public ADS-B flight-tracking data with FAA registry records at 20:00 to track student pilots from departure to their home doorsteps. She concludes at 24:00 by calling on the FAA and regulatory bodies to modernize aviation privacy standards, restrict open access to personal identifying information, and protect general aviation aviators from digital harassment. (AI summary — Gemini Flash)