this post was submitted on 15 Dec 2023

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Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find (arstechnica.com)

submitted 11 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

16 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Trains were designed to break down after third-party repairs, hackers find::The train manufacturer accused the hackers of slander.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 11 months ago (2 children)

With the fake parts scandal for airplanes I wonder if this should be mandatory for parts that impact public safety for public transport like trains, buses, planes and so on.

Dont get me wrong, I want a full right to repair enshrined in law and using a system like this just to prevent it is clearly wrong, but if it could be adapted to allow for critical parts to be made under license by third parties and helped prevent fake parts then may be a small amount of good can come from this shitty practice.

[–] [email protected] 17 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This doesn't have anything to do with fake parts. The Polish government bought trains. They have the right to get them serviced by whoever they want. And the original manufacturer intentionally and secretly sabotaged those efforts. Instead of worrying about a hypothetical problem, why not worry about a shown actual problem? That a product the government bought to benefit its citizens can be disabled even when nothing is broken?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Its not hypothetical, its a widespread issue for aircraft: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/airline-scandal-fake-parts-scandal-b2459534.html

and did you even read what I wrote?

Dont get me wrong, I want a full right to repair enshrined in law and using a system like this just to prevent it is clearly wrong,

[–] [email protected] -3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I did. The article isn't about planes.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 11 months ago (1 children)

The article is about right to repair, third party parts, and systems designed to block both of them, which I applied to an existing problem that applies to planes for certain and almost certainly other forms of public transport. Even a shit idea can be repurposed to improving the common good.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

To be honest, while train safety is extremely important, aircraft safety is a whole ‘nother ballpark. Shit going very wrong on a train is bad, and may kill a lot of people. Shit going very wrong on a plane is catastrophic, and will almost certainly kill everyone on the plane.

Source: I have worked in aerospace. The rules and laws around this stuff are very much written in blood.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

While parts don't need to be made to the same standard nor do you need the same depth of safety components, I completely disagree that we should not be applying the same hygiene to part province and maintenance schedules. Obviously this should apply to track side components such as signalling, the track etc. as well, just like it should for the parts of an airport that a plane will interact with.

Avoiding utter maintenance shit shows like the train crash in India that killed 300 people seem just as attractive to fix as they do with planes. Or the toxic spills that America has had that may not have killed as many people but are still expensive and hugely disrupting.

Part of getting maintenance schedules followed properly and using quality parts is right to repair, part availability, and being able to prove part provenance and quality. A method to audit a part is essential for this, if we do whats needed by allowing 3rd parties to make parts to original spec for a reasonable cost, like we should to lower cost. Lower cost, more chance companies will avoid cutting corners, particularly if there is a proper audit trail for the part and you can actually prove that it is the *part *as well.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 children)

You’re not accounting for the substantial differences between the physical contexts in which trains and aircraft operate; the physics in play are wildly different, and have substantially different risk profiles due to that.

If an engine breaks…

on a train: the train stops.
on a plane: depending on the situation, the plane has to make an emergency landing in the next case, and everyone dies in the worst case

If a structural issue exists and begins to spread:

on a train: it can be catastrophic, but the situation will likely devolve in a more segmented fashion, simply because trains move far slower than planes do.
on a plane: it will almost certainly be catastrophic, and the situation commonly devolves rapidly, if not nearly instantaneously, because passengers jets normally operate around .85 Mach.

More generally: the difference is that the “catastrophic spectrum” that can affect aircraft is much broader and has far more extreme consequences - as in, passenger survivability is often all or nothing, or at least very close to it.

Edit: not to mention: you’re talking about Indian trains, which are in notoriously poor repair, and commonly operate at passenger capacities that would give most European, American, Korean, Japanese, or Chinese civil engineers a serious case of hives. Also not to mention: if this is the accident to which you’re referring, the fatality rate was ~25% - obviously not great, but if a similarity catastrophic air incident were to have occurred (e.g. a midair collision), the fatality rate would have been 100%.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

I am intentionally not accounting for it, as its irrelevant to an end to end parts tracking system.

Your difference is only really relevant to the standards that the part is made, the safety systems the vehicle needs to have including redundancy, and the frequency and depth of the maintenance schedule.

Both need to be able to prove that shoddy third party parts haven't been fitted, that the parts have been replaced on schedule, even if the quality of the parts and the frequency of replacement is completely different.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago (1 children)

They way you’re talking about this make me pretty confident you’ve never actually worked in a safety-critical environment. There are different thresholds for different things in different situations, and there are excellent reasons for that.

And once again, you are categorically disregarding the poor maintenance and high average age of the Indian train system. I don’t care that you are “intentionally” not accounting for it - not accounting for it means the basis on which you’re evaluating the incident is fundamentally flawed. If I were to not change the oil on my car for 25k miles, I would expect to have an issue, and it would be my fault. Poor maintenance can and does lead to catastrophic outcomes, and there are countless instances throughout history where poor maintenance was the proximate cause for a loss of life.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 11 months ago

And again, I don't see that it applies at all to what is a parts tracking system, its not a maintenance plan, a direct safety system, operational guidelines for engineers or anything else you are falsely trying to make it.

You keep describing the maintenance schedule, which is again, irrelevant to tracking the history of parts. Age of the system is also irrelevant to the problem here, a system outside or inside its operational life span can still have shitty black market parts fitted to it making it more unsafe than using the correct part.

The airline industry in particular has been hit with a number of planes being fitted with bogus parts, this is despite all of the things you talk about, they have not worked for tracking parts and proving their provenance. Hence, a more robust system is needed.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago (1 children)

With the fake parts scandal for airplanes I wonder if this should be mandatory for parts that impact public safety for public transport like trains, buses, planes and so on.

Airplanes are vastly more complex though. Four engines, flying at extremely high altitudes at hundreds of km/h, fully airtight, powerful onboard generators, food prep areas, bathroom etc, extensive ethernet networking for the small IFE units and WiFi access points, list goes on...

Whereas a train doesn't have anything close to that, even the high speed ones with all the bells and whistles, so I think it would be a bit unreasonable to expect them to be held to the same standards as an airplane.

The only train I'd suggest an exception for would be a maglev though - OEM parts only there please, especially for traction and em equipment 😳

Dont get me wrong, I want a full right to repair enshrined in law and using a system like this just to prevent it is clearly wrong, but if it could be adapted to allow for critical parts to be made under license by third parties and helped prevent fake parts then may be a small amount of good can come from this shitty practice.

Some independent validation of the manufacturing materials, their grade and assembly quality could work well here, since I'm not too sure if blindly trusting the parts manufacturers would be a great idea as long as they have profits in mind

[–] [email protected] 3 points 11 months ago

Agree with you about the level of standards, there needs to be some for train and bus parts but not to aircraft standards.

I also agree any part manufacturer to be audited to which level they are working at and prove a chain of custody for that part. They grey and black markets need to be squeezed out as much as possible, obviously you have to give the end customer, airlines, rolling stock owners, etc. a cost incentive with right to repair to honor the system. As any system can be hacked or broken with enough of a cash incentive.

I think the OEM having to license, at a reasonable cost, the exact spec and design for a part to third parties is an important part of any right to repair. You cannot self repair if you cannot get replacement parts for a reasonable cost.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 11 months ago (1 children)

Planned obsolescence on steroids.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 11 months ago

Steroids? They've done a complete speedrun lol

Imagine if it was a more mundane issue, let's say the air line in a carriage has blown out and none of the doors work under their own power. Roll the train into the third party workshop to carry out the fix... a copyright notice flags up on the panel screen and now you've got a long 20 ton dead brick in your workshop

Imagine this happened with cars, that would be outrageous man

[–] [email protected] 11 points 11 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

The code also allegedly bricked the train if "certain components had been replaced without a manufacturer-approved serial number," 404 Media reported.

In a statement, Newag denied developing any so-called "workshop-detection" software that caused "intentional failures" and threatened to sue Dragon Sector for slander and for violating hacking laws.

"We also notified the Office of Rail Transport about this so that it could decide to withdraw from service the sets subjected to the activities of unknown hackers."

Newag president Zbigniew Konieczek said that "no evidence was provided that our company intentionally installed the faulty software.

So far, Dragon Sector does not appear intimidated, posting its success on YouTube and discussing its findings at Poland’s Oh My H@ck conference in Warsaw.

The group is also planning "a more detailed presentation" for the 37th Chaos Communication Congress in Hamburg, Germany, at the end of December, The Register reported.

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