this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2024
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I'm assuming it's a torque wrench, which can apply variable force to a bolt.
Scan a barcode next to the hole, insert bolt, wrench applies correct force for the piece.
They can also similarly check the tightness of the bolt and record what it measured for quality control.
Every bolt doesn't use the same torque, and manually inputting the value is slower and more error prone.
Similarly, checking the torque and recording that it was correct and fixing any errors is slower and more error prone with manual lookup.
The why not just have the barcode have all of that information encoded in it and not reference a database on a network?
My understanding is that it's more for logging in industries like aerospace, where it's imperative to be sure that bolt X was tightened with force Y if you don't want the airplane to fall apart. Networking isn't the only way to do this, or even the only automated way, but I guess they didn't want to have to hook each wrench up to a USB cable at the end of every shift to download its log.
(The comments section on Ars is studded with remarks about Boeing, as you would expect.)
Because in event of a product change all wrenches can be updated immediately via network with all new codes and torques instead of someone having to go through each tool and upload new specs or swap memory cards manually.
It may not make much sense to us, but for a manufacturer it saves time and reduces the number of bodies needed to do the tech work. That’s $.
Not an industrial process engineer, so I can't tell you all the possible reasons, but in general it works out well to assume that people have a reason for why they do stuff, and doubly that you probably can't do someone's job better than them with 10 minutes of thinking.
My initial guess would be that you want the system to record "yes, I tightened these bolts", and then you want that record to have a matching "I inspected these bolts and they were correct" follow-up entry.
My next thought would be what you do if the sticker falls off. In the sticker only solution, you have to look up the part, and then enter the parameters into the tool. In the networked system, you look up the part and then the system programs the tool. Automatic is going to be faster and have less errors. Both of those improve product quality and save money, through time, not having to fix error, or having to dispose of parts that were made incorrectly and can't be salvaged.
The existence of a vulnerability is very different from the exploitation of that vulnerability.
You fix the vulnerability, but you don't need to worry too much when a prerequisite is that the attacker has already gained a privileged position in the system.
This is "oof" not "oh shit".
I am that kind of engineer and yep that’s why I’d use them. And yeah the hacker that has your wrench probably has your assembly line and server too.
But of a slippery slope. What else do we need to encode?
A barcode doesn't have enough bits to be unique and also contain useful information. It's just a unique identifier that can be used to look up a wide variety of information.
For bolts, it could be metal grade, thread pitch, load ratings, manufacturer info etc
Also, say Boeing discovered that the doors were flying off their airplanes because the specified torque was too low for the bolts. If the barcode contained the torque, the barcodes would all have to be replaced. If the barcodes point to a database entry that contains the correct torque, you can update the DB and the wrenches will get the new value when they look it up.
Having said that, this should definitely be an air-gapped system. There's no need for the wrenches to be able to talk to Bing or OnlyFans. It shouldn't just be behind a firewall, because, again, it's not like the wrenches only need to access someof the Internet, they really never need the Internet, just the local network.
I'm not a network engineer, but my guess is that a good network engineer could design a network that makes it really unlikely that a wrench ever exchanges packets with the real Internet. For example, design a flat network and use a very small TTL so that even if somehow the Internet is connected to the network the wrenches live on, the packets expire before they leave the local network.
If you can't isolate and protect the network you're using, you're just asking for trouble, because that means that every single piece of industrial equipment with a TCP/IP stack is properly patched and hardened against the latest vulnerabilities.
For critical bolts you want a record in a database. See Boeing’s panel scandal for the need for that. Could be a local-only database though
Based on the product details it is. It's not an Internet connected tool.