Pierluigi Paganini February 24, 2019

The British Airways Entertainment System, as installed on Boeing 777-36N(ER) and possibly other aircraft, is affected by
a privilege escalation issue tracked as CVE-2019-9019.

Experts discovered a critical vulnerability in the British Airways Entertainment System. The flaw is a privilege escalation issue that resides in the component USB Handler, an attacker could exploit it using an unknown input to escalate privileges.

The affected British Airways Entertainment System is installed on Boeing 777-36N(ER) and possibly other aircraft, it does not prevent the USB charging/data-transfer feature from interacting with USB keyboard and mouse devices.

“The British Airways Entertainment System, as installed on Boeing 777-36N(ER) and possibly other aircraft, does not prevent the USB charging/data-transfer feature from interacting with USB keyboard and mouse devices, which allows physically proximate attackers to conduct unanticipated attacks against Entertainment applications, as demonstrated by using mouse copy-and-paste actions to trigger a Chat buffer overflow or possibly have unspecified other impact. ” reads the description for the vulnerability published by Mitre.

The flaw was reported on 02/22/2019, it was tracked as CVE-2019-9019, a local unauthenticated attacker could potentially exploit it.

At the time of writing, there are neither technical details nor an exploit publicly available.

Entertainment systems are crucial components in aviation, they could represent entry points for hackers. In December 2016, Ruben Santamarta, a security researcher from IOActive, discovered several vulnerabilities in Panasonic Avionics in-flight entertainment, aka IFE systems.

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – British Airways Entertainment System , hacking)

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