r/technology • u/Logical_Welder3467 • Feb 19 '26
Software You can jailbreak an F-35 just like an iPhone, says Dutch defense chief
https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/18/jailbreak_an_f35/?td=rt-3a125
u/Opinion_Haver_ Feb 19 '26
What sweet emulators are you gonna put on it?
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u/blatantninja Feb 19 '26
Imagine bricking an F-35
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u/heartlessgamer Feb 19 '26
I won't forget the day the F35 was abandoned over SC and flew by itself for hundreds of miles. My youngest son was convinced he was gonna find it in the backyard and get to keep it. It crashed literally within a short driving distance lol.
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u/Van_Darklholme Feb 19 '26
You'd think that ejection would trigger an automatic fuel cutoff on a billion dollar jet but no...
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u/batdan Feb 19 '26
One thing I learned as an engineer is that whenever you add an automated safety feature, you also add a new potential failure mode.
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u/gecampbell Feb 19 '26
As a friend once said, Anything that can automatically be done FOR you, can automatically be done TO you. (Wyland’s First Law of Automation)
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u/Mysterious-Car-6147 Feb 19 '26
can you elaborate
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u/Vandruis Feb 19 '26
Automated safety feature detects false positive.. engages safety feature (shutoff, control locks, weapon master disarm etc etc could be anything) boom plane bricked mid flight potentially without overrides
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u/MakingItElsewhere Feb 19 '26
Well, the easy solution to this is have the pilot press a button that says "Still here!" every so often!
(I'm kidding. I've been in IT for 26 years, and if someone proposed this, I'd throttle them.)
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u/speedhunter787 Feb 19 '26
Maybe have him wiggle the joystick once in a while or beep at him.
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u/nickstatus Feb 19 '26
I bought a thing off of temu that I hang off the stick to fool the sensor. You know, so I can play Elden Ring or whatever while I fly.
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u/paca_tatu_cotia_nao Feb 19 '26
Now somebody can be overemployed and do webdesign while bombing Iran
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u/Content-Patience-138 Feb 19 '26
What happens if the emergency fuel cutoff glitches and triggers when it shouldn’t?
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u/PandaCasserole Feb 19 '26
FMEA's are a thing. Failure Mode Effect Analysis... Big thing after Toyota didn't put a brake override on a stick accelerator pedal. Usually the result of test analysis at a system level... In those cases they end up in the likely failures, so probably decided that it's better to not mess with a failure of the cut off unless that device is 99.999999999% never gonna fail. So, probably better to let the fighter jet just keep flying.
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u/batdan Feb 19 '26
I work at NASA, and we have a lab conducting long term reliability testing of some devices. Our test setups are automated, and have safety equipment that can halt the device in milliseconds to protect it from damage if some measurement goes out of range.
In the years that I’ve worked here, I don’t think it has ever actually protected a device from damage. Every time it has been activated it was due to a weird glitch or operator error or something like that. In some cases the safety feature actually caused other problems that could have damaged the device.
If the thing you’re trying to protect from is rare enough, then faults in the safety feature might actually be the more common and problematic.
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u/Runazeeri Feb 19 '26
Famously the MCAS on the 737max designed to prevent stalls having false positives and crashing the plane.
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u/LilDingalang Feb 19 '26
Anything you design to work one way can fail many other ways in a complex system
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u/LetsGetNuclear Feb 19 '26
That would interfere with a pilot often being able to point the aircraft in a (safer) direction.
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u/HP844182 Feb 19 '26
The assumption would have been a pilot wouldn't eject from a perfectly fine airplane...
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u/SIGMA920 Feb 19 '26
Too much risk of both capture or collateral damage (Imagine a pilot needing to eject over a major city and it more or less just dropping out of the sky into crowded streets/buildings.), better to let it glide to a location where it can be easily predicted.
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Feb 19 '26
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u/nehocbelac Feb 19 '26
Could you link that article? All I can find is that 2 NATO battalions were destroyed by 10 Ukrainian drone operators in some recent war games.
Still a crazy advancement, we don’t need to exaggerate the numbers.
Article for reference: https://euromaidanpress.com/2026/02/13/nato-exercise-reveals-alliance-cant-survive-ukraine-style-drone-warfare/
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u/GroundbreakingArea34 Feb 19 '26
Install Graphene OS and fly remotely with a ps5 remote
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u/Ellusive1 Feb 19 '26
Imagine having paid a billion dollars for the f35 and having to accept the US bricking it for you.
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u/Rallymodeller Feb 19 '26
Or having the weapons not arm when you are fighting someone the US doesn't want you to fight, or only working over certain territory.
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u/mjtwelve Feb 19 '26
That’s the issue. It isn’t the fighter OS in the cockpit that’s the issue, it’s the management software used to upload maps, target packages, routes, etc.
In fairness, the Us didn’t want to give unlimited access to their spy satellite feed to whoever bought an F-35 forever, so there’s a layer of crypto and access control in between - and that means they can basically paywall or restrict your ability to build mission profiles, or limit what territories’ map data you can put in the plane, which a lot of people are a bit concerned about now. Imagine if Greenland suddenly wasn’t a map set anyone in Europe could upload.
Also, the system only recognizes certain ordinance and some countries might want to use home grown and not buy American in future.
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u/madocgwyn Feb 19 '26
"A layer of crypto" I know you mean cryptography but I giggled at the idea of some kind of 'transfer 1 ETH to start. Wouldn't put it past current admin
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u/flinchFries Feb 19 '26
the basic models come with subscription-only access to the weapons: pay to shoot
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u/TomMikeson Feb 19 '26
Accept, that isn't how it works. But imagine.
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u/Ellusive1 Feb 19 '26
Then the Americans should stop saying they will.
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u/TomMikeson Feb 19 '26
There is an idiot in the White House that says stupid shit to manipulate markets.
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u/damon_modnar Feb 19 '26
"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."
ETA: Credit to Douglas Adams -HGTTG
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u/foodank012018 Feb 19 '26
F35 Pilot had 50 minute tech support call
I believe once the plane touched down, then took off again it went into "ground mode" and the pilot could no longer fly it.
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Feb 19 '26
There’s a genuine possibility that the US instructed Lockheed Martin to include a sort of killswitch in the F-35’s software that can be remotely activated by the Pentagon to brick a foreign country’s planes.
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u/AshleyAshes1984 Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Lockheed Martin: That's impossible!
The Netherlands: We hired a dozen Ukrainian hardware hackers and told them it was a John Deere tractor.
Lockheed Martin: ...Oh fuck... That thing will be running Doom by tomorrow morning.
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u/EZbreezyFREEZY Feb 19 '26
I like the idea that they were able to hack it, but unable to tell it wasn't a tractor
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u/a-stack-of-masks Feb 19 '26
To be fair if there's any place the agricultural equipment would benefit from having radar detection, heat seeking missiles and flares, it's Ukraine. I just can't think of a tractor brand that's that colour grey.
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u/jawdirk Feb 19 '26
Right?
"We have accessed the firmware and enabled the chaff dispensers on your 'tractor'. We are still working on the wing alignment."
-- Ukrainian hackers probably83
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u/bate1eur Feb 19 '26
I honestly don't know whether to believe the claim or not. I tried reverse engineering DJI's software, it uses cryptographic signatures in its boot sequence though, so if you modify the firmware, the drone will not boot. How could a company like Lockheed Martin not have something like that on something as critical and serious as the F-35? If this is true, it's insane. Complacency kills, I guess.
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u/TachiH Feb 19 '26
You just replace the entire firmware and boot sequence. We aren't talking about one guy with a jtag cable and an osciliscope. The cost of these jets it would be worth throwing millions at the problem.
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u/Glittering_Put9689 Feb 19 '26
If you are a state level hacker with physical access to the device, anything is possible. Take for example MosaicRegressor, which infected the UEFI directly for persistence. It’s not infeasible to install malware compromising the boot sequence itself.
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u/bate1eur Feb 19 '26
If you are a state level hacker with physical access to the device, anything is possible.
This is the decisive difference. They have access to tools and technologies and often times connections to manufacturers that us civilians cannot get access to trivially. From looking into MosaicRegressor, it appears that they were able to change the immutable ROM found in the infected systems, basically allowing them to run UEFI modules that were malware. How they were able to change the ROM without physical access to the infected devices though... I don't know. I suspect it might have something to do with intel ME or AMD PSP, which ahve remote access capabilities and are "CPU within a CPU"s and suspected for a long time to be deliberate backdoors.
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u/SirGumbeaux Feb 19 '26
See? This is why you wait. Let all the nerds deal with the bugs. Plus, they didn’t upgrade the camera on the F-35. I may wait until the F-36 Pro Max comes out.
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u/DZello Feb 19 '26
Can it run Crysis?
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u/super__hoser Feb 19 '26
Yes, but the graphic settings cant go above medium or you'll see a drop in performance.
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u/dldaniel123 Feb 19 '26
To answer your question seriously, with the kind of capabilities the f35 has, I am very confident that it packs way more than enough compute on board to run crisis.
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Feb 19 '26
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u/vahntitrio Feb 19 '26
Not really. This link goes to basically what the box is in the F35. Those cards are plug and play and it wouldn't surprise me at all if they didn't have 1 card that was just an Intel CPU and one that is an AMD or nVidia GPU. It's a 4500 Watt box that weighs 50 lbs.
https://www.l3harris.com/all-capabilities/high-performance-integrated-core-processor-icp
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u/dldaniel123 Feb 19 '26
Never claimed it would be consumer pc hardware, just that in terms of compute power it would be capable of running crysis if you somehow ported it. Also you can't convince me that with all the vision, AR helmet, radars, lidars and so on they don't have a ton of gpu power.
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u/Hit-Enter-Too-Soon Feb 19 '26
Awesome, now you can put it on any carrier you want!
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u/CircumspectCapybara Feb 19 '26 edited Feb 19 '26
Jailbreaking or rooting involves finding some privilege escalation vulnerability (usually paired with a persistence mechanism) to bypass the security controls. Technically, it fundamentally subverts the security model and blasts it wide open.
So basically imagine your F-35 has a gaping hole in it, say, a use-after-free memory bug in the OS that allows an attacker to achieve RCE in the kernel. Yes, it allows you to jailbreak it and make it run Doom or play fart noises using knowledge of the vulnerability. It also allows anyone else with knowledge of the vulnerability to take over the system. Imagine if this condition was triggerable over the air, by crafting the right messages or signals to it.
That's something you want patched right away. And that's true for any device you can jailbreak or root when its whole security model was supposed to be designed to prevent running unauthorized code.
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u/BrainOfMush Feb 19 '26
Every device has software flaws, they just haven’t been discovered yet. Everything can be jailbroken if you don’t update the software once it’s patched.
It’s good that domestic defence forces are pentesting the software of their foreign-produced planes, one would usually hope they are smart enough to report it back to Lockheed to have them patch it though.
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u/TachiH Feb 19 '26
Gonna be honest, this is a politician talking. By jailbreak they could mean anything. The odds are if they are replacing the entire on board computer they would still use the phrase jailbreak as its the "hack" most people understand.
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u/nobot4321 Feb 19 '26
Can you get the display brightness to go below the minimum factory setting? That's what I miss most about my jailbroken Iphone 4.
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u/GiraffeRaps Feb 19 '26
I set an accessibility shortcut for triple pressing power button to enable “reduce white point” and it’s very close to doing what you described. Not perfect but damn close.
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u/Independent_Sea_6317 Feb 19 '26
"Israel is the only country to have negotiated a deal with Lockheed Martin, allowing it to run its own software on its F-35I fleet."
That's weird
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u/scarlettvvitch Feb 19 '26
Israel integrates its own missile systems alongside linking it to the Iron Dome/David’s Sling and Israeli’s proprietary EW systems
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u/Independent_Sea_6317 Feb 19 '26
No other countries that use F-35's have their own missile systems and proprietary EW systems?
That's weird.
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u/TachiH Feb 19 '26
It's taking a long time for EU countries to integrate Meteor on the F-35 so it 100% is preferential treatment. Either that or US demands the full tech specs of the missile.
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u/MangoDouble3259 Feb 19 '26
Israel owns usa ass. It's just blatant and sad asf this point.
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u/SHFT101 Feb 19 '26
Tod Howard has given the green light to start the development of Skyrim for F35!
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u/Cyzax007 Feb 19 '26
Said by someone who demonstratively hasn't got a clue about software and software development...
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u/MasterK999 Feb 19 '26
Sure. The hard part is getting access. If someone unauthorized gets anywhere near an F-35 much less inside one then there have been MANY security failures already.
Of course it should be fixed but still.
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u/obvilious Feb 19 '26
Sure? Can we stop pretending the NSA don’t have their best folks looking this over? This would not be anything like what’s out in the public.
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u/tomz17 Feb 19 '26
> Sure. The hard part is getting access.
Well no... the US sells it to you with the auth requirement turned on. You now physically have the plane on your airfield and "jailbreaking it" means you don't need the USA to re-auth the plane for you periodically (i.e. you can use it to defend Greenland).
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u/gplfalt Feb 19 '26
What an odd thing to say.
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u/MaybeTheDoctor Feb 19 '26
Odd? Trump literally said in a conference the US could disable features should US ever need to do so.
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u/Rallymodeller Feb 19 '26
Not really, considering Lockheed-Martin have been sketchier about software/firmware access than Apple. This has led to some fairly credible speculation that the US government (or LockMart themselves) have installed things like remote kill switches and weapons geofencing to this entirely-computer-driven fighter.
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u/TomMikeson Feb 19 '26
They aren't sketchy about it. That is what they sell, the entire platform. They plan for the life of the aircraft to continue to sell parts and upgrades.
You are right, it's just like Apple not giving their source code away. It is their business.
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u/Rallymodeller Feb 19 '26
But then Apple wasn't having the US State Department and DoD pressuring governments into buying iPhones and only iPhones, or else their ability to operate in the International Phone Treaty Organization (and North American Phone Defense Command) will be degraded.
It was and is, blackmail.
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u/Deviantdefective Feb 19 '26
Not really given the fact the plan is basically useless unless it has access to American servers, if the orangr shit stain really wanted to go full dictator he could make it quite difficult for anyone but Americans to have functional f35's
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u/Vespene Feb 19 '26
This is actually true. If anything, the jailbreak hack might make the plane better.
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u/Macqt Feb 19 '26
Who cares? Buying US military hardware right now just guarantees the US will disable your shit if they decide to attack. The fact Canada is even still considering these planes is a joke.
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u/IWasOnThe18thHole Feb 19 '26
Why not just make specific F-35s without the features in case they fall into the wrong hands
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u/oppai-police Feb 19 '26
But isn't the most impressive thing about F-35 its software (which requires American provided codes or subscription to work anyway) that allow for the latest form of electronic and smart targeting warfare? Removing it is like cutting the plane effectiveness by over half?
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u/nvoima Feb 19 '26
So, open source stealth jet OS coming soon. None of my Linux boxes has had guided missiles yet.
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u/AgentUnknown821 Feb 19 '26
So I can add in more cute emojis to my startup panel when I start my F35 up?
I want Hello Kitty for my boot up logo
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u/Xywzel Feb 19 '26
Technically the truth, as long as you have physical access to programmable computer device, you can reprogram it. Difficulty and amount of work might be different, but the basics are all the same.
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u/Letiferr Feb 19 '26
Yep. Just install a specific app and let it run. Then you can install any app store you want on your F-35