Could HD Radios be next Virus target?

[radiopilot]

As I was getting ready for my next consulting contract, I deal with the codes for aircraft systems that go into the black boxes on military aircraft... right now it's the Sikorsky UH-60 Helicoptor...

Anyway since now the HD radios consists of DSP for decoding embeded IBOC codes and converted to the appropriate codes similar to CD systems.. it's based on computer chips no different than the ones used in your computer right now... well if someone with devious minds decided to embed such a virus into the music being played over the air which would then need to be decoded, would it cause havoc with the processor and or computer chips whether they are ROM based or FLASH based.. I don't know the particular coding for the Ibiquity systems but I'm sure a hacker would know this if he really wanted to cause a virus spread into all those HD radios via the broadcast signal... after all the PPM for Arbitron works in such a way as that... they send a code along with the music or sweepers which only the PPM would decode... in such a manner a hacker can send such a code....

For example the Sangean HDT-1 board has a Samsung K4S643232H 8-megabyte dynamic RAM, PCM1803 24-bit A/D, PCM1782 24-bit dual D/A, and LTC3411EMS voltage converter. The underside of the board contains several additional chips, including a utility microprocessor that handles non-DSP functions... Basically alot of components susceptable to hacking....

Anyone understand what I'm getting at?....

That would surely be the demise of HD radio as we know it, alot of angry owners of HD equipment which would be rendered useless... doorstops if you will....

Radiopilot

 

[clouseau]

As I was getting ready for my next consulting contract, I deal with the codes for aircraft systems that go into the black boxes on military aircraft... right now it's the Sikorsky UH-60 Helicoptor...

Anyway since now the HD radios consists of DSP for decoding embeded IBOC codes and converted to the appropriate codes similar to CD systems.. it's based on computer chips no different than the ones used in your computer right now... well if someone with devious minds decided to embed such a virus into the music being played over the air which would then need to be decoded, would it cause havoc with the processor and or computer chips whether they are ROM based or FLASH based.. I don't know the particular coding for the Ibiquity systems but I'm sure a hacker would know this if he really wanted to cause a virus spread into all those HD radios via the broadcast signal... after all the PPM for Arbitron works in such a way as that... they send a code along with the music or sweepers which only the PPM would decode... in such a manner a hacker can send such a code....

For example the Sangean HDT-1 board has a Samsung K4S643232H 8-megabyte dynamic RAM, PCM1803 24-bit A/D, PCM1782 24-bit dual D/A, and LTC3411EMS voltage converter. The underside of the board contains several additional chips, including a utility microprocessor that handles non-DSP functions... Basically alot of components susceptable to hacking....

Anyone understand what I'm getting at?....

That would surely be the demise of HD radio as we know it, alot of angry owners of HD equipment which would be rendered useless... doorstops if you will....

Radiopilot

Are they Black Helicopters? ;D Sorry I couldn't resist.

I don't really think you will ever see this happen. The largest example of this would be probably be the "Black Sunday" code released by DirecTV to combat hacking on their "H" cards years ago. Nothing I have seen indicates the code in the receiver is rewritable from off air reception. The few that actually have that function publiclly available, all require a "Firmware" update, per se. Unless they could find a Black Sunday-Like destructive code, the WORST that could happen would be a few localized receivers could be prone to attack. Far less liely than anything we are all at risk for AS YOU READ THIS with your computer on the Internet.

Still I guess anything MIGHT be possible. As I always say at work, We got the best protection in the business. No one can get through this except a 15 year old in a garage in Korea.

I just don't see the fun in it. Or the potential profit like Phishing. Or the access at the station. Or... Well you get the idea. Still it IS intriguing.

Clouseau.

 

[radiopilot]

As I was getting ready for my next consulting contract, I deal with the codes for aircraft systems that go into the black boxes on military aircraft... right now it's the Sikorsky UH-60 Helicoptor...

Anyway since now the HD radios consists of DSP for decoding embeded IBOC codes and converted to the appropriate codes similar to CD systems.. it's based on computer chips no different than the ones used in your computer right now... well if someone with devious minds decided to embed such a virus into the music being played over the air which would then need to be decoded, would it cause havoc with the processor and or computer chips whether they are ROM based or FLASH based.. I don't know the particular coding for the Ibiquity systems but I'm sure a hacker would know this if he really wanted to cause a virus spread into all those HD radios via the broadcast signal... after all the PPM for Arbitron works in such a way as that... they send a code along with the music or sweepers which only the PPM would decode... in such a manner a hacker can send such a code....

For example the Sangean HDT-1 board has a Samsung K4S643232H 8-megabyte dynamic RAM, PCM1803 24-bit A/D, PCM1782 24-bit dual D/A, and LTC3411EMS voltage converter. The underside of the board contains several additional chips, including a utility microprocessor that handles non-DSP functions... Basically alot of components susceptable to hacking....

Anyone understand what I'm getting at?....

That would surely be the demise of HD radio as we know it, alot of angry owners of HD equipment which would be rendered useless... doorstops if you will....

Radiopilot

Are they Black Helicopters? ;D Sorry I couldn't resist.

I don't really think you will ever see this happen. The largest example of this would be probably be the "Black Sunday" code released by DirecTV to combat hacking on their "H" cards years ago. Nothing I have seen indicates the code in the receiver is rewritable from off air reception. The few that actually have that function publiclly available, all require a "Firmware" update, per se. Unless they could find a Black Sunday-Like destructive code, the WORST that could happen would be a few localized receivers could be prone to attack. Far less liely than anything we are all at risk for AS YOU READ THIS with your computer on the Internet.

Still I guess anything MIGHT be possible. As I always say at work, We got the best protection in the business. No one can get through this except a 15 year old in a garage in Korea.

I just don't see the fun in it. Or the potential profit like Phishing. Or the access at the station. Or... Well you get the idea. Still it IS intriguing.

Clouseau.

How did you know? I worked on the Comanche before it got canned, the Apache also 'black' for special ops, and the V22 Osprey seen on my radio studio photos, and now the UH-60 which is also a special military operations upgrade... but you'd need a secret clearance for me to tell you what it does....

Anyway, about the virus... Ipods now have viruses for which Microsoft shipped with it's firmware, and cell phones are prone to viruses which somehow come in on the signal...so HD is also prone to viruses if a certain mp3 or download were to occur and then broadcast.... who knows....

http://www.apple.com/support/windowsvirus/

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2004/12/27/tech/main663287.shtml

It's not out of the realm for someone to do this.....

Radiopilot

 

[SUPERCASTER]

Yes.
If we are all very lucky someone will reprogram all the HD radios to receive only FMeXtra!
What a terrific idea.

 

[Mike Walker]

The code for the music being played goes to the digital to analog converters! Digital audio ain't exactly an executable code. Any virus, if even possible (and I suppose anything's possible, especially with binary code) would actually have to originate at the station or group owners (or so it seems to me). And it would have to be implanted through some addressable component of the radio...such as the part that allows "limited access" content. Music wouldn't touch that, but the code from the station would.

Ok, admitting that it's possible, what the hell would be the motivation for the station, and what would the purpose for the virus be? What could you coax a radio into doing? Unlike your computer, it wouldn't hold any personal info such as credit card numbers, etc. It's not connected to the internet, so you can't use it for a denial of service attack. What could you have a radio do?

 

[clouseau]

Ok, admitting that it's possible, what the hell would be the motivation for the station, and what would the purpose for the virus be? What could you coax a radio into doing? Unlike your computer, it wouldn't hold any personal info such as credit card numbers, etc. It's not connected to the internet, so you can't use it for a denial of service attack. What could you have a radio do?

I'm putting my money on the previously mentioned "Kicking your dog when you not home" feature.

Clouseau

 

[Mike Walker]

Hmmm. Let's start with having the radio yell "NO, DAMMIT!" if he chews on my shoes!

 

[awj223]

Ok, admitting that it's possible, what the hell would be the motivation for the station, and what would the purpose for the virus be? What could you coax a radio into doing? Unlike your computer, it wouldn't hold any personal info such as credit card numbers, etc. It's not connected to the internet, so you can't use it for a denial of service attack. What could you have a radio do?

Major stations wouldn't have motivation to do this, but pirate radio could do it. Still, since in radio one set of electronics does the transmitting, another set does the receiving, and neither is capable of both, it would be impossible to create a worm - a malicious program that spreads from host to host and uses each host to infect new hosts. Radios can't transmit, so the infection would end there.

 

[Mike Walker]

The equipment to address the radios costs about a hundred grand. I don't see this as being a huge problem. I think I'll worry about the black helicopters

 

[radiopilot]

Ok, admitting that it's possible, what the hell would be the motivation for the station, and what would the purpose for the virus be? What could you coax a radio into doing? Unlike your computer, it wouldn't hold any personal info such as credit card numbers, etc. It's not connected to the internet, so you can't use it for a denial of service attack. What could you have a radio do?

Ok... let's look at this scenario... suppose employee X at WWWW station got nixed for some reason, and he decides to embed such a virus into the audio stream and then broadcast via the HD transmitter(s)... to the transmitter it doesn't care... but to the HD digital radio it's components could be wrecked by the virus rendering the unit useless... the HD radio itself will not transmit anything, simply go dead... along with hundreds, thousands, millions of HD radios since the virus code would only infect the digital portion of the signal, analog radios would simply ignore the code.... Cellphones are on the alert for this sort of virus... rendering the phone useless..

Such a hacking could happen... it's not all impossible...

Radiopilot

 

[Tom Wells]

Hmmm. Let's start with having the radio yell "NO, DAMMIT!" if he chews on my shoes!

You named your dog Dammit?

 

[Mike Walker]

Tom Wells asks "You named your dog DAMMIT"?

Why yes, DAMMIT! You got a problem with that?

Honestly I've ruined the little guy. My wife calls "here sweetheart, come to momma", and he ignores her. Then I screan "get your a## in here now, you little sonofabit%h!" and he comes running. My studio is at home, so I'm with him all day long. He actually likes it when I yell at him. He doesn't think he's really been "called" without the profanity. I love critters...sometimes more than people!

 

[MotoMuzak]

Just my personal musings--

I don't really see how bombing an IBAC rig with some kind of "computer virus" wouldn't be possible, especially if the receiving rig is equipped with EEPROM or Flash chips. Probably the only way to prevent this from happening with any technology--whether it be a digital radio, CD player, video game box etc. is to set the thing up entirely with standard ROM chips. That way it likely wouldn't be suceptible to viruses or malicious code-downloads. But then, upgrades to the firmware would become very costly, if not impossible. (That route really isn't practical.)

Many computer motherboards with a soldered-in (not socketed) Flash BIOS chipset, like my Intel Pentium 3 motherboard (upon which I actually have an early ~700MHz AMD Athlon processor!) have a small jumper or sometimes a DIP switch to enable re-writing or read-only attribute on the BIOS. This is a necessary feature because, in fact, there ARE viruses that can re-write the computer's BIOS and render it unstable or completely unuseable.

With the right coding an HDTV broadcast, in theory, could include malicious software transmitted along the signal attacking some part of the receiver's architecture. Even modern cell phones have been known to host/spread viruses. So yes, in my view it could very well be possible to spread some kind of "anti-IBAC virus" attacking Ibiquity receivers.

But that begs the question of why would anybody *want* to bother doing that in the first place??

"Ok, admitting that it's possible, what the hell would be the motivation for the station, and what would the purpose for the virus be? What could you coax a radio into doing? Unlike your computer, it wouldn't hold any personal info such as credit card numbers, etc. It's not connected to the internet, so you can't use it for a denial of service attack."

Precisely. What would the point be, except to possibly be an act of "radio vandalism"? Seems like a type of "broadcast graffito" to me.

 

[Chuck]

Precisely. What would the point be, except to possibly be an act of "radio vandalism"? Seems like a type of "broadcast graffito" to me.

Why do some people spray paint graffiti on other people's property? Why do people maliciously try to hack into computers? I can't imagine anyone seriously wanting to do these things, yet we see senseless stuff every day.

 

[PhilJSmith67]

This thread assumes that these chips' codecs contain code with "unchecked buffers" (coding defects) and are also programmed to allow reprogramming/flashing via the received RF data stream, as opposed to a data interface on the circuit boards.

 

[Black_Shire]

Precisely. What would the point be, except to possibly be an act of "radio vandalism"? Seems like a type of "broadcast graffito" to me.

Why do some people spray paint graffiti on other people's property? Why do people maliciously try to hack into computers? I can't imagine anyone seriously wanting to do these things, yet we see senseless stuff every day.

I can think of two motives for doing such a thing. A terrorist organization could scare the pants off the public by causing all digital TV sets, digital cell phones, and digital radios to suddenly stop working. A brief message from them explaining what was about to happen and their power to do it would be like the old "Outer Limits" introduction come to real life. If this were done in concert with denial of service attacks on the main internet nodes, putting millions of people in the dark (information-wise, that is), it could cause mass panic.

Or, a diehard supporter or supporters of continued analog broadcasting could do it to demonstrate the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of digital broadcasting.


-- Black Shire

 

[PhilJSmith67]

Hold on a sec... Broadcasting in the digital domain does make an automatic implication that digital receivers must all contain a "path" for RF-reprogrammability of internal codecs, flash memory, or any portion of their hardware whatsoever. If this assumption was reality for digital equipment, then the whole 800 MHz Trunking relocation project that is underway (which is causing hardware headaches for police, fire, government, businesses, Sprint/Nextel, etc.) could simply be "uploaded" to every 2-way trunked transceiver out there. The reality is that a negligible percentage of these two-way receivers can be reprogrammed from the FM control channels they "listen" to 24/7, which is why the entire project is taking years to complete. Many of these receivers must be individually reprogrammed through a hardware data port. Some have to be "rechipped" or completely replaced.

I highly, HIGHLY doubt that you could reprogram, hack, etc. many if not most of the HD Radios on the market. Just because they contain flash memory does not automaticlly imply that they are coded to receive flash reprogramming via the IBOC signal. This is especially true of the AAC or MP3 bitstreams, which contain data without any executable code. Still, if you're in belief that the only safe HD Radio is an unpowered HD Radio, you might want to hop over to the AVS Forum / HD Radio topic and ask someone like Master Theseus (from Sangean) if the receivers are engineered to accept reprogramming from any FM or AM station.

About the worst thing that a hacker could do by hacking transmitter equipment is screw up everyone's clock on their radio, or activate the alternate-frequency (AF) feature to cause radios to change channel, which would most likely fail because most receivers with a strong enough signal would not elect to change channel. By the way, RDS-equipped radios would already be "hackable" with these techniques.

 

[dumber than a box of hair]

I just don't see the fun in it. Or the potential profit like Phishing.

Most of the people who do this sort of thing, according to numerous studies, don't do it for either fun or profit. They do it for bragging rights among their peer group. They do it because they can...and the best way to get them to do it is to tell them they can't do it.