From this CNN story, the question is raised about whether hackers will be able to cause your car to crash among other things.
We don’t yet live in a world where hackers can crash your car. But computer engineers widely agree we’re heading in that direction by connecting our cars to the Internet.
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Cars are now connected to the Internet. That means someday in the not-too-distant future, a hacker could knock your car off the highway.
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Could some imaginative dickwhistle cause enough cars to become disabled thus causing a traffic jam of unseen proportions at rush hour? Perhaps cause cars to accelerate in unsafe weather?
I’m not liking any of this. If you read the article, you see that several of the automakers are now using advanced technology to track you, where you are and how you drive. I’m not liking that either.
Picture your next car with a HAL 2000 computer. It’s here.
Eventually, yeah. They’ll shut down a power grid…some day. They’ll open a diverting switch on a high-speed railroad…some day. They’ll crash cars…and airliners.
Meanwhile, all of these facilities are susceptible to ordinary vandalism. You could drop a brick from a bridge over the high-speed railroad. Bricks have been dropped onto freeways, killing drivers. The giant power links coming in to southern California from Arizona go through hundreds of miles of empty desert: any jackass could go out there and knock down a pylon.
We have a civilization that depends on high concentrations of energy. This has been true since we first kept fires going inside our houses. We’ve had some of our houses burn down ever since then, too.
The thing is that at this point the computer that runs your radio/navigation (and which might have an internet or onstar type connection) and the computer modules that actually run the engine/abs/cruise control/etc are completely separate. The ability of the computers to interact is completely dependent on the actual physical connections between them. At this point, it’s mostly limited to the control modules sending diagnostic info (and stuff like mileage and fuel consumption) to the dashboard computer. The dashboard computer might be able to turn the engine on and off if it has a remote start function and (annoyingly IMHO) a lot of them run the HVAC, but other than that it can’t actually “control the car” in any meaningful way.
The only way I’d think it ever would make sense to link the control modules would be if we started allowing self-driving cars without human operators, but that’s a lonnnnnnng way off.
If it became a problem then it would be a simple fix. Computers have to be connected to an antenna. Disconnect the antenna. If it’s using the electrical wiring as an antenna then it would be a matter of installing a block between the connector.
For drivers who wish to have On-Star type connections then a relay is installed.
As long as various governments demand “access at will” to the web (the Internet was CREATED by the US Department of Defense), there will always be a manner for hacking.
When Unix was first sighted (1980’s, IIRC) it had been created by a group of grad students and had something on the order of 56 KNOWN trap doors.
We used it anyways.
Coming soon: Faraday cages for your car.
Of course failing to allow the National Safe Highways Adminstration to control your car will be a very serious “Moral Failing” for which you will need “corrective therapy”.
It’s clear that on some cars you can wirelessly access the infotainment and security computers, which allows you to do things like unlock the doors and bypass the security to start and stop the engine. It’s also clear that some people have been able to take control of the engine and braking system on some cars, but in everything I’ve read with the latter case, they were accessing the computers through the OBD-II port, not the infotainment system. They still would have needed to have a device physically connected to the car at some point to do it.
I think a lot of news articles on the subject are conflating the two situations and claiming that you can wirelessly control the drivetrain of the car, which I don’t believe is actually the case. Both of those two situations above are serious security problems, but they don’t amount to the idea of hackers being able to remotely take control of cars and crash them at will.
That’s not true anymore. Teslas, for example, allow over the air firmware updates that can change the engine timings and suspension profiles of the car. All updates have to be digitally signed by Tesla which means theoretically, you would require access to Tesla’s private key to send an update but it’s not inconceivable that you could exploit a bug in the update code to perform a malicious update.
OTA updates offer so many benefits that it’s hard to imagine other car companies not implementing it in the near future. Tesla is run by a Paypal co-founder so presumably they’re able to get some decent security people working on the update mechanism but I’m not at all confident that Detroit automakers know how to implement secure OTA.
Still though, I find the fears of people hacking into cars somewhat overblown. There aren’t many people in the world who seem to be motivated by random acts of carnage. Huge parts of critical infrastructure such as power grids and water treatment has been known insecure for years and yet the number of attacks against them is remarkably low. Undoubtedly, state level actors have collected known attacks for years and, if there were to be a sufficiently large conflict, those exploits would be used. I imagine the same will happen to bugs around car hardware.
I would agree with that. It does still seem to require physical access to get at things like engine control, brakes and steering.
I’m not sure I agree with this. There seem to be a lot of people who just don’t get that actions taken “on-line” actually have repercussions in the real world.
As I think I mentioned upthread, my car does not have any electronic locking features. The locks are strictly mechanical. Well, yeah, I can’t lock/unlock it remotely, but on the upside the locks can’t be hacked electronically, either.
That’s why I asked if in the future people will have the option to buy cars that don’t have these bells and whistles.
If this “dream” of high-speed, closely-spaced pods zipping around automatically is to happen, every car which uses roads above some class level will need to participate.
A manually operated car trying to keep up with the speed and complexity of “the Cloud” would be a disaster.
Maybe, at first, only certain stretches of interstate or high-density commute routes will require computer control. Within a generation, it will be certain remote roads reserved for “old farts who still think they can run a car all by themselves”.
UNIX was written in 1970. The rest of the crap you posted is not worth responding to.
I don’t think you have the knowledge to make that assessment. Especially when you talk about the “engine timings” of Tesla’s cars. Stay in your lane, dude.