Egregoros

Signal feed

Timeline

Post

Remote status

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/jailbreak_an_f35/

There is a point.

Just look at the attack surface of a modern fighter jets with local mechanics, access to the code and access to the hardware.

As vendor this is a battle you have lost if your customer has the motivation to do so.

I also think this was aimed at the government of the county of the vendor there.

Because when he said:
"If you still want to upgrade despite everything, I'm going to say something I should never say, but I will anyway: you can jailbreak an F-35"

he really said:
"If you still want to upgrade despite everything, I'm going to say something that we decided in several meetings with a lot of people involved that I will say this in this specific way: you can jailbreak an F-35"

Replies

1

I have a hard time believing they were really motivated to prevent jailbreaks, because if you wanted to stop it, you'd encrypt the ram and encrypt the bootloader with a per-device write-only key that's burned into the SoC die (à la IBM CELL), then you can encrypt the OS and code with a key in the bootloader... Then to prevent it from barfing up the code when someone finds a buffer overflow, flag the executable pages as non-readable. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯