Barr Doesn’t Guarantee Privacy, Says IT Expert

“The Block Aircraft Registration Request [Barr] program doesn’t really provide privacy; it’s just a barrier,” Dustin Hoffman, president of Los Angeles-based IT engineering firm Exigent Systems, told AIN. Hoffman, who has a private pilot certificate and flies a piston single for his business, set out to prove his point at the Defcon 20 computer security conference last month in Las Vegas.

For a presentation at the computer hacker event, he decided to pick an aviation-related topic, “since aviation seems to draw attention at Defcon.” So Hoffman and his associates spent about 80 man hours developing OpenBARR.net, which uses open-source speech recognition software (called Sphinx, and developed by Carnegie Mellon University) and live air traffic control communication feeds at LiveATC to identify the movements of aircraft, even those enrolled in Barr.