Car Hacking Concerns On the Rise 95
Pat Attack writes "I think most of the people who read Slashdot know that if it has circuitry, it can be hacked. Well, the good folks over at CNN have an article about the potential for your car to be hacked. This article lists the potential damage that could be done, proof of concept work, as well as a few scary scenarios. 'With vehicles taking up to three years to develop, [security strategist Brian Contos] says manufacturers will struggle to keep abreast of rapidly-evolving threats unless they organize regular software updates. Instead, he says, any installed technology should be given a so-called "white list" of permissible activities beyond which any procedures are blocked.' My mom reads CNN and is a Luddite. I expect to hear from her today. She'll probably tell me my new car with bluetooth is unsafe."
Will be worse with self-driving cars (Score:5, Interesting)
Car hacking is bad. Botnets are bad. But what about a botnet of autonomous vehicles?
Imagine owning a botnet of cars you could command to drive anywhere at any time. You could effectively close a highway or a bridge, prevent emergency response teams from getting to a destination, or switch the cars into some kind of "Carmageddon" mode where they target pedestrians.
Yeah, we'd be pretty much fucked if this happened.
A bigger threat (Score:5, Interesting)
Is how these updates will be applied:
1) Automatically via some wireless service. Bad idea. I'd hate to even go there.
2) In authorized service centers. This is scary because, the auto manufacturer will be able to warn us from going to non-authorized dealers, saying it's a security issue on top of a quality issue. We've already ran into these kinds of issues [righttorepair.org]. It's come up before here on Slashdot [slashdot.org].
Overhyped problem. (Score:5, Interesting)
This article is crap. They only quote a CD-based infotainment attack which requires access to the vehicle, and an aftermarket system attack which was poorly engineered. They describe a TPMS DOS attack (RF interference from the sensors) that might make your check tires light come on. Boring.
Right now, if you car doesn't have a RF transceiver, there is nothing to worry about since gaining physical access to the network requires breaking into the vehicle.
If your car does have an RF link (bluetooth, cell phone), you're still relatively OK - infotainment systems as a rule are very segregated from the powertrain networks and usually only linked by a CAN bus that only supports some high level messaging. The Infotainment ECUs do not share the same CAN bus as the powertrain components and there is generally an ECU that acts as a "firewall" such that any DOS-style attacks on the infotainment CAN bus won't affect the other vehicle systems.
I will concede that vehicles with OnStar are a bit more concerning, as I think OnStar has more hooks into the rest of the systems, although I'm not sure how deep. So that is one to worry about...
There have been some attacks demonstrated against the outward facing systems where an attacker can mess with your radio, but the systems are architected such that an attacker needs physical access to the bus to do any real damage to a vehicle.
Here's a good discussion:
http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf [autosec.org]
Thanks, fellow slashdotters! (Score:3, Interesting)
Two of them, ABS braking and fuel injection ( with OBD2 ), I am all for. The rest of 'em though seem to me a design from Rube Goldberg.
Don't get me wrong. I love driving aids, especially GPS, and I love OBD2 that lets me see how the Engine Control Unit is faring.
I am a "control freak". I feel responsible for what my machine does. I want the assurance of a steel rod running from my steering wheel to the rack-and-pinion gearing steering the front tires, and knowing there is no way for anyone to instruct my car to ignore my steering commands. Same with the brakes - hydraulics. And acceleration/fuel for the engine - a cable linkage.
These, I understand, and have an inner feel for when anything is amiss.
"Drive by Wire" scares the hell out of me.
This whole thread gives me comfort knowing that I said the right thing to the repair garage a few months ago when they told me it was going to cost right at one thousand dollars to re-do the entire braking system on my nearly 40 year old toyota, that has hauled me nearly a half a million miles. They advised me it was an old car and not worth all that much. Well, maybe not to them, but I have come to really have a love for the simplicity of that old car. I had them redo the whole shebang - every cylinder, caliper, shoe, and hose. By golly, I consider the brakes the most critical part of the car. If ANYTHING works, the brakes will,
As one of the other posters noted, it is a great fear of mine too that "pranksters" will discover access pathways into a fancy car and wreak havoc by remote control, anonymously, just for the fun of watching the crash. Its the same thing that made "Winnuke" so popular back in the early internet days, when we found out we could send just one malicious packet to someone to give them the blue screen of death. We'd do it for the pure fun of it.
Although I like the new car's interiors, for now I will consider them a "rich man's toy" because they are so expensive to maintain.
As a side note, its not the cost that kills my enthusiasm, rather it is my impression of quality. I believe in getting good value for my money. I have even been spending $15-$20 for flashlights... ( Ultrafire WF-502B's with various P60 LED engine cartridges - and only WF-502B ) because these lights are made to last, and being the owner of a few laptops, I have plenty of the Lithium 18650 cells these lights use. I am hooked on those 18650 cells giving their second life powering things on the cell level ( 3.6 to 4.2 volts per cell ) when the laptop battery pack fails. Meanwhile I have plenty of little dollar-store LED lights, and have retrofitted my old filament-based D-cell flashlights with LED's
Most of the time, newer technology is better, but its not always the case.
Sometimes its just not "done" yet and other times it wasn't such a good idea in the first place but some marketer saw a buck in it.
Well, anyway, that's my take.
Driving it is dangerous enough (Score:5, Interesting)
If I can set the car to drive anywhere I want and disable safety features, isn't that dangerous enough?
So far, those who have insisted their software's security is perfect have a very, very bad track record.