He calls them toys, but EWU professor Dan Tappan is making devices that model real-world cybersecurity vulnerabilities | News
Publish Date: 2026-05-28 04:30:00
Source Domain: www.inlander.com
Using an unordered list, summarize the following article with between 4 and 8 key points.
EWU professor Dan Tappan plans to build this model plane that can pivot on gimbals.
Rendering courtesy Dan Tappan
Aerospace cybersecurity isn’t necessarily a field that lends itself to oversimplification, but Dan Tappan doesn’t mince words when he describes the project he’s working on.“I’m building toys to play with,” he says. “That’s not the most detailed and academic wording there, but that’s actually very much what we do in my classes. We get something to work and then we mess with it. It’s to show how certain systems work. And then how they don’t work.” As the program director for computer science and electrical engineering at Eastern Washington University, Tappan has big plans for the 17 toys he’s ultimately hoping to develop and fabricate. Once completed, they’ll exist as a suite of tabletop devices representing different phases of the real-world airport experience — from the moment a traveler parks their car to the point when they pick up their luggage at their destination.From the standpoint of airport security, Tappan says that starting at the parking garage makes sense.“This is something that the average person doesn’t take into account,” he explains. “We have this perspective that [a security breach] is going to be another 9/11 Hollywood-style attack. But anything that disrupts this complex machinery of the aerospace ecosystem causes problems. If somebody messes with the parking garage and travelers can’t get in, then pretty much everything else downstream is messed up.”Not to be alarmist, but even after the stringent security measures and checkpoints that were implemented in the wake of the terrorist hijacking on Sept. 11, 2001, air travel remains especially vulnerable. According to Tappan and other cybersecurity experts, the main reason that malicious actors haven’t yet put too much effort into disrupting airport operations is because there’s not a lot of money to be made from it.But complacency would be a mistake. In his proposal for this project, Tappan cited Washington’s own U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who highlighted some concerning trends at a 2024 Congressional Hearing on Aviation Cybersecurity Threats. The senator used her opening remarks to note that aviation cyberattacks alone had increased 74% in the preceding four years. Then she shared her very recent firsthand experience of flying out of Sea-Tac after a hacker group had taken down the airport’s display boards in a ransomware attack.Tappan intends for his devices to provide physical scaled-down models of objects like those display boards as well as baggage handling equipment, shuttles, networking systems, the plane itself and even the in-flight entertainment system that’s embedded into the headrest.That hands-on hardware will be complemented by and connected to software controls, some of which are already being used in EWU’s cybersecurity and computer science classes. The students will then learn how the software interfaces with those objects in what you might call experimental cause-and-effect exercises. The aim is to better understand the complex interplay known as mechatronics, which Tappen describes as “the glue that makes a coherent system of [disparate] systems.”One of the first devices from his aerospace cybersecurity suite will be a three-foot cube that contains a suspended plane. Though it won’t be airborne (drones and RC planes are planned to come later), the gimballed plane will afford students the opportunity to perform a remote or simulated action and observe its effect in real time.“It reflects all of the actions that a real plane does. It can pitch up and down, roll left and right and yaw. All of the little flight control surfaces, the things you see moving on aircraft, are also on there,” he says. “So it’s basically just a small model airplane. But it’s connected to a complex system that makes it look like it’s really flying. And from that, then we can investigate things like what if something goes wrong? What are the effects if something breaks or something is hacked?”The concept for another device is an airport tram that resembles a model railroad, complete with signal light and gates that are connected to software control systems similar to those used by major airports.As an engineer and a longtime pilot, Tappan plans to build many of the prototypes himself over the next 18 months. Having those in hand as, in his words, “a proof of concept” might attract the interest of more partners, collaborators and funders, which could then expand the capabilities of the suite and even put it in more college classrooms.More importantly, the devices will help eliminate some of the abstraction that Tappan wrestles with when trying to demonstrate the practical impact of lines of code — especially if that understanding has the potential to avert disaster and save lives.“We have computers, and everybody knows what those look like,” he says. “So these devices are meant to be — well, they play a lot of roles. They’re learning tools, but they’re also inspirational tools. What I’m trying to do is just get students at all age levels engaged, get them curious and thinking about things, because that’s where it starts.”
