China mulls space-based control system for high-speed rail. Can it be hacked?

On a summer evening in 2011, two high-speed trains hurtling through the Chinese countryside met in a fireball of twisted metal and shattered glass. The Wenzhou disaster, as it came to be known, killed 40 people and injured nearly 200. The official inquiry traced the catastrophe to a lightning strike that had fried a trackside circuit, making one train “invisible” to the control centre, which then wrongly cleared the line for the train behind. However, could the “brain” of the railway ever be made so resilient that no single bolt of lightning, no flood, no earthquake could ever again fool it into a fatal mistake? Fifteen years later, a team of railway researchers in Beijing has proposed an answer: lifting the railway’s nervous system into space. Their on-board computers have limited power to run complex security software, and once a satellite is in orbit, patching a software vulnerability is a challenge. A determined adversary could exploit a buffer overflow, seize control of the satellite and turn it into a puppet that relayed malicious commands to every train in its footprint. Worse, the ground stations that managed these satellites could be infiltrated via the internet or subverted by an insider, allowing an attacker to poison the entire constellation. “Encryption keys and data could be localised, processed and stored within the host country’s borders,” said the scientist, who requested not to be named due to the sensitivity of the issue. “For the hundreds of millions of passengers who will board high-speed trains in the decades ahead, it will be a space-based lifeline,” he added.