Researchers at UC San Diego and Oberlin College built a device the size of a coin. costs under $100. it plugs into a maintenance port inside the electronics bay under a 737's nose the same port mechanics use to test avionics. the hatch to that bay isn't locked. getting to the port takes about 15 seconds with no special tools and installing the device takes under a minute. once it's in, it sits between two systems that are supposed to trust each other: the Flight Management Computer, which holds the flight plan, and the Multipurpose Control Display Unit, which is how pilots read and edit it. the device intercepts that conversation and injects false data. takeoff weights. flight plans. what shows up on the pilots' screen. lead researcher Stefan Savage described the question that started the project: "if you could get 60 seconds with an airplane, what could you do?" turns out, quite a lot. they didn't test this on a live commercial flight. they spent years and tens of thousands of dollars rebuilding a 737's internals from secondhand parts into a lab testbed they called Triton. Boeing says existing safeguards make a real-world attack unlikely. the researchers still fly 737s. back in 2015, a security researcher told the FBI he'd hijacked a plane's engine controls mid-flight through the entertainment system. nobody could ever verify it. This is the first time anyone's built the hardware and shown the work.