As you might imagine, security is a prime concern of every airline around the world. This is not just a matter of keeping people safe but also a response to the world watching to see how well airlines manage security. From the very beginning of commercial flights 100 years ago, safety was the priority. Airlines and the government worked closely together to demonstrate to the American public that flying—clearly the fastest form of transportation—was also safe enough to be considered worry-free. The meaning of airline safety has acquired different definitions over the decades. In recent years, preventing viral infections has been a key safety concern. As the world has transformed into a digital village, one of the main concerns of the industry has been safeguarding travelers’ information.

Before They Protect You, Airlines Safeguard Your Information

Largely, because flight security requires a lot of data about you, airlines necessarily come into possession of a lot of your personal statistics. In order to protect your privacy and your financial data as well as your physical safety during and after a flight, airlines must have secure means to store and quickly access your information. Theoretically, this turns airlines into targets of those who wish to steal identities and confidential material. Recognizing this, airlines employ a variety of crypto security techniques—for instance, many airlines use passwordless login procedures. You may be familiar with some types of this technology, such as facial or fingerprint recognition, encrypted keys and “token-based†identification—which is a bit of texted data sent to your portable device.

Steps Airlines Take to Protect Passenger

Of course, it is not just your identification and your financial access that airlines are interested in protecting. As from the beginning of commercial airlines, they are interested in keeping you safe. They accomplish this in a number of ways:

Remember those lines leading to the TSA checkpoints? Those are preflight safety measures. Not only do they do a good job of keeping unsafe people off of airplanes but they single out those potentially dangerous items you should have left at home.

Then there are the preflight instructions. You may know that every word the flight attendant speaks has been approved by the FAA, all designed to keep you safe.

Every plane has multiple redundant safety mechanisms. Modern airplanes were created by people who thought through any possible scenario, then designed the plane and trained the pilots to know how to handle them and land safely.

Hackers Are Virtual Hi-Jackers

In this digital age, complete reliance on the internet has not only simplified our lives and made them much more productive but has also created a new band of criminal misfits: internet hackers. While you likely will never physically encounter or even personally interface with a hacker, they touch your lives daily through the cyber security measures you have been forced to adopt. By definition, new hacks always precede the security to counter them. Recognizing this, airlines have adopted zero day exploit measures. Zero day refers to the introduction of new software or platforms that might have unknown security flaws. Not every possible hack is conceived of by developers. To guard against the bad actors who try to get around security, airlines and other companies utilize a process called micro-segmentation. Essentially this means writing software in unique blocks so that if it is corrupted by malware, only a small portion of the program needs to be removed and rewritten.

Airlines Set a High Standard to Protect Your Information

How do airlines know if they are doing a good job of handling the data they receive every day? As Forbes reports, the airline industry has a unique tool called System and Organization Controls (SOC) 2. This sets standards for guarding passengers’ sensitive data in five areas—privacy, confidentiality, security, process integrity and availability. Crypto security is used to safeguard your information in each area.

As airlines move forward, they tend to partner and contract only with other companies that use highly advanced forms of security.