Aviation & Logistics Cybersecurity
CERT-In empanelled cybersecurity services for Aviation & Logistics organisations. 6,700+ assessments delivered since 2006.
Challenges
Security challenges in Aviation & Logistics
Crew, passenger and shipper PII at scale — bookings, passport numbers, frequent-flyer accounts, and payment instruments subject to GDPR, DPDP, DGCA, and IATA requirements
High-traffic booking engines and payment-card processing at PCI DSS scale — loyalty program APIs, partner-airline interlining, and fraud-detection integrations
OT, IoT, and safety-critical systems — aircraft and ground equipment running networked OT with segmentation gaps and vendor-managed access concerns
Multi-jurisdiction data residency — a single passenger record may transit India, the EU, the GCC, and the US in hours
24/7 operations with zero downtime tolerance — security testing that cannot disrupt live systems
Trusted by
The estate
Most of an airline's systems belong to other organisations
The passenger experiences one brand. The systems delivering it are a consortium, and the interfaces between them are the surface.
Reservation and distribution
Booking frequently sits on a global distribution platform shared across the industry, reached by travel agents and aggregators as well as by the airline. The tenancy and the credentials into it are yours; the platform is not.
Departure control and check-in
Operated at airports by ground handlers who serve several airlines from the same terminal and sometimes the same workstation. Access is issued to people employed by neither you nor the airport.
Loyalty programmes
A currency with real value, redeemable, transferable, and attacked accordingly. Account takeover here is theft rather than a data breach, and it is the most consistently targeted surface an airline has.
Maintenance and engineering systems
Records, planning and parts, frequently shared with maintenance organisations outside the airline. Integrity matters more than confidentiality, which is the reverse of most of the estate.
Crew and operations
Rostering, flight planning and dispatch. Not customer-facing, and disruption here stops the operation more effectively than anything on the website does.
Airport-side and cargo
Baggage, gate systems and cargo handling, run by the airport or by handling agents, integrated with your systems because the operation requires it.
The data
Following one passenger record through the consortium
The interesting question is not who holds it, but how many organisations can retrieve it with a legitimate credential.
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Created
Booked, on your channel or somebody else's
Direct, through an agent, or through an aggregator. Each path creates the same record through a different door, and the doors do not have the same locks.
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Enriched
Identity, payment and special requirements attach
Passport details, payment data and — where a passenger declares a medical or accessibility need — data more sensitive than either. It is attached to the same record and rarely handled differently from the rest of it.
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Distributed
Shared with everyone who has to act on it
Handlers, catering, airports, immigration systems and codeshare partners. The record fans out to organisations whose security you do not set, over interfaces built when the priority was that the flight departs.
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Retained
Kept long after the journey
For loyalty, for accounting and for dispute handling. The retained copy is usually the least protected one, because the systems holding it are the ones nobody has revisited.
What we test
What an assessment can reach, and what it deliberately does not
Scope in aviation is defined as much by what is excluded as by what is included, and the exclusions belong in writing before the work starts.
| Area | How it is treated |
|---|---|
| Passenger-facing digital | Website, mobile applications and the APIs behind them, tested fully. Account takeover and authorisation between passenger contexts are the priorities, because loyalty balances make this the most actively attacked surface. |
| Agent and partner interfaces | The credentials issued to travel agents, aggregators and corporate booking tools. Tested from the position of a legitimate holder, because that is the position an attacker buys or phishes. |
| Airport-side workstations | Assessed by configuration and access review rather than by active testing during operations, and coordinated with the handler. A shared workstation serving several airlines is a segregation question first. |
| Operational and airborne systems | Out of scope for active testing. Anything that touches an aircraft or live air-traffic interfaces is examined by architecture and interface review only, with the boundary written into the engagement before it starts. |
Passenger-facing digital
- How it is treated
- Website, mobile applications and the APIs behind them, tested fully. Account takeover and authorisation between passenger contexts are the priorities, because loyalty balances make this the most actively attacked surface.
Agent and partner interfaces
- How it is treated
- The credentials issued to travel agents, aggregators and corporate booking tools. Tested from the position of a legitimate holder, because that is the position an attacker buys or phishes.
Airport-side workstations
- How it is treated
- Assessed by configuration and access review rather than by active testing during operations, and coordinated with the handler. A shared workstation serving several airlines is a segregation question first.
Operational and airborne systems
- How it is treated
- Out of scope for active testing. Anything that touches an aircraft or live air-traffic interfaces is examined by architecture and interface review only, with the boundary written into the engagement before it starts.
Where this goes wrong
Operational systems are not IT systems, and treating them alike is the mistake
The instinct that serves an enterprise IT estate well — patch quickly, isolate aggressively, reimage when in doubt — is the wrong instinct applied to systems that keep an operation running. A departure control workstation cannot be isolated during a turnaround. A maintenance records system cannot be taken down for an afternoon because the maintenance it records has to be evidenced before an aircraft is released. Change windows are set by the operation rather than by the security team, and they are short. What this means in practice is that the assessment has to produce findings somebody can actually act on inside those constraints: compensating controls where a patch is not available on the operation's timetable, segregation where isolation is impossible, and monitoring where neither is. A report that recommends immediate remediation across an operational estate is a report that will be read once and shelved, and the estate will be no safer for having been tested.
Services
Recommended Services for Aviation & Logistics
Targeted security services matched to aviation and logistics challenges
Web Application Penetration Testing
Secure booking platforms, crew management portals, and passenger-facing applications from application-layer attacks.
Learn More →Network Penetration Testing
Internal and external network VAPT for airside and landside networks, cargo management systems, and logistics hubs.
Learn More →OT and SCADA Security
Security assessments for baggage handling, air traffic management interfaces, and ground-support system PLCs.
Learn More →Cloud Security Assessment
AWS/Azure workload security for airline reservation systems, crew scheduling, and cargo tracking platforms.
Learn More →Red Team Assessment
Adversary simulation across IT and OT boundaries to test detection and response in safety-critical environments.
Learn More →Compliance
Frameworks that matter to Aviation & Logistics
Frequently Asked Questions
Will any of this touch aircraft systems?
No. Anything that touches an aircraft or live air-traffic interfaces is excluded from active testing and examined by architecture and interface review only, with the boundary agreed and written into the engagement before work begins. What is tested actively is the enterprise and passenger-facing estate — reservations, loyalty, the applications, the APIs and the corporate environment — where a fault has no operational consequence.
So much of our operation runs on third-party platforms. What is ours to test?
The tenancy, the integrations and the access model across them — which is where the findings usually are. A distribution platform or a departure control system is delivered by its vendor, but the credentials issued into it, the entitlements attached to those credentials, the interfaces connecting it to your systems and the lifecycle of accounts held by handlers and agents are all yours. Testing that is neither testing the vendor's product nor duplicating their assurance.
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