Hacktivism for the Masses: the Northwest Boarding

Pass Generator and WikiScanner

Elizabeth LoshUniversity of California, Irvine

And thus, I now present: Chris's Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator

Using this, you can:

1. Meet your elderly grandparents at the gate2. 'Upgrade' yourself once on the airplane –by printing another boarding pass for a ticket you're already purchased, only this time, in Business Class.3. Demonstrate that the TSA Boarding Pass/ID check is useless.

Have Fun! Christopher Soghoian

Ed: The only way for these kind of problems to get fixed, are through public full disclosure. TSA/DHS cannot be expected to fix anything unless they are publicly shamed into doing so.

This situation is made even worse when you consider the fact that you can print your own boarding pass online at home.

This is often a bunch of text/html, with one or two images (a barcode, and perhaps an airline logo). It is trivially easy – as in, 20 seconds with a text-editor, and not even requiring you to open photoshop – to open it up, and change the name.

Christopher Soghoian

The Church Sign Generator

Persuasive Games

These pages serve two purposes. The first is to distribute a boarding pass generator for NWA. The second is to demonstrate the framework that the NWA generator was written in, with the hope that you will write your own document generators like this one.

The motivation for writing this boarding pass generator and framework is twofold. First, it is clear that even though the weaknesses in our airport security system were known about for some time, no action was taken until Christopher Soghoian produced his script. His generator got people's attention, and was taken off the internet.

j0hn4d4m5

Web 2.0 Generators

WikiScanner

Messin’ with Texas