I wrote about this vulnerability and told airline reservation companies about it in 2002:
https://hasbrouck.org/articles/watching.html
These vulnerabilties could be fixed. But no CRS or airline has ever approached me to ask how they could be fixed.
Travel companies care about threats to their money, not threats to individual travellers’ privacy or security. They will deny this, but their decades of failure to address these well-known and well-publicized vulnerabilities proves that this is true.
I first wrote about these issues in my book, “The Practical Nomad Guide to the Online Travel Marketplace”, published in early 2001, in which I said, inter alia, “Privacy is the Achilles heel of Internet travel planning”.
I have said consistently since then, in print and in many venues, that I believe that commercial and illicit exploitation of PNR data and other travel metadata (metadata about the movement of your physical body, as compared with telecom metadata about the movement of your messages) should be at least as much of a concern as government access to or use of this data.
But since 9/11, the focus of public and political and media attention has all been on government access to and use of Passenger Name Records (PNRs), rather than on the commercial abuse of this data, and the vulnerability to intrusion and illicit exploitation, that predated 9/11 and has continued unabated.
If the data protection laws that have been in effect since the early 1990s in the EU and Canada had been enforced, CRSs would have been required to make changes that would have significantly reduced some of these vulnerabilities.
Mister44 says, “Hackers probably don’t have much motivation to do this sort of thing.” That depends, of course, on how you define, “hacker”. In my experience in the travel industry working with reservations, the most commonly-detected real-world threat to reservation data is by perpetrators of stalking, harassment, domestic violence, and kidnapping or assault in child custody disputes. Those who are detected are usually trying to get access to PNR data through pretexting. (I used to train travel agents to be alert to the possibility of this sort of pretexting.) There could be many other motives for a targeted attempt to get access to info about the travel of a specific person of interest.
Other attack methods, such as those demonstrated by SRLabs at CCC, are less likely to be detected.
Mister44 says this is, “something airport security doesn’t seem to worry about because it never happens.” It would be a mistake to think this never happens. Airlines and CRSs don’t worry about it because it doesn;t affect their profits.
There are no access logs. Each PNR stored by a CRS includes a change log called the PNR “history”, but not an access log. So we would be unlikely to know the scope of attacks unless an attacker (a) was caught be other means, and (b) confessed to their mode of attack.
Airlines and CRSs will act only when either (a) governments order them to do so, and enforce those orders by jailing
executives who don’t comply, or collecting fines large enough to affect executives bonuses and investor confidence in their stock, or (b) public pressure forces them to do so following a scandal when some murderous stalker confesses that they tracked down their former domestic partner and killed them and/or their children through PNR data.
I hope that (a) comes before (b).
Answers to more FAQs about this here:
