I would never ever want to be in a car which acceleration can be controlled remotely via Internet, even in theory.
You'd have to go back at least ten years to find cars without it.
The real problem is that the designers of CANBUS never dreamed of a day when rogue nodes could show up on the network and start broadcasting messages they should not be broadcasting. Automotive embedded systems were closed loops and, aside from perhaps a diagnostic tool in the garage while parked, not susceptible to spoofing messages.
It's easy to say that the architecture is flawed, but that's no excuse at all. The CAN-bus allows control of the car, so non-control devices should not be allowed to send control messages on the CAN-bus.
It's the same as blaming the insecure architecture of the internet when your password gets snooped, when you should have just used a secure tunnel.
Unfortunately CAN is not as complex as an IP packet. It's essentially a one-wire serial bus with collision detection. Even RS-232 lets you clip the TX line so that a device could listen but not send. You would need to clip the TX before the CAN transceiver, and that's something nobody typically does.
But it's cheaper to use a single bus and just slap everything on there. Or in the case of something like OnStar, realize you can add extra capabilities through firmware and not fully think about the impact when your radio can send unfiltered messages to your ECM.
https://www.onstar.com/us/en/services/security.html
I hope they get this sorted before self driving cars... (50 bitcoin in 20 minutes or your car takes a drive off the pier...)
I would NOT like to think about what would happen to someone who tried this sort of thing. I expect within seconds of the first accident (or worse, injury, even fatality) causing malware being discovered, the resources of the entire NSA would be being used to track down the author. Then, when found, 'bad day' would not begin to describe the rest of their life. In fact, I can see this sort of thing being validly placed under 'terrorism' and dealt with appropriately.
People who randomly attack vehicles being driven around today (brick thrown off bridge over a busy road into windscreen et al) are not the smartest, or have poor self control or other issues, but they are actually quite rare. To pull off an automated hack would require enough intelligence that they can surely understand the consequences. Therefore, this will be done by a genuine psychopath (or sociopath? never quite sure of the terminology) or terrorist group.
I think we should be as worried about vehicular-malware-based-death as we are about dying from other terrorist attacks. So yes, I know that means the risk is small, but the general public will over estimate it, and worry inappropriately. That seems to be a matter of education, not technology, though...
I suspect whole auto industry needs to re-learn (if they ever learned in the first place) the lesson of the Therac-25 and what "fail safe" means. Some dangerous situations should not be possible.
Unfortunately, I suspect the auto industry will choose to learn those lessons the hard way. When people die from someone messing with their steering or brakes remotely, I hope whomever signed off the idea of mixing remote signalling with critical systems is found personally liable for manslaughter.
This is one of big problems with the software industry nowadays. It has a role to play in nearly every major industry but does not have the same regulatory hoops to jump through to get into that industry. In this case, I am sure multiple mechanical and electrical licensed professional engineers had to stamp all of the physical components that make up the vehicle but I would be very surprised if any software was ever signed off on by a licensed professional engineer explicitly (there is a case to be made for implied acceptance by the engineer of record for the system that the software runs on but I think it is weak).
It will be interesting to watch the ongoing situation with Chrysler:
http://www.wired.com/2015/08/chrysler-harman-hit-class-actio...
If the class action goes forward there will be a legal examination of whether a security flaw that allows remote tampering is a safety defect or not (of course it is, but I mean in the context of liability).
I pretty much expect that automakers will quickly start shipping systems with effective segregation (the cost pretty clearly doesn't outweigh the PR downside), so the interesting question really is whether the cars on the road today represent negligence or not.
Maybe because even the Government didn't think anyone was so stupid?
a lot. You can start by looking up if any of these old timers raised anything remotely similar to that concern. Remember how insanely unprotected the Internet was in the beginning? How SMTP basically still is? That was build by some of the smartest people in the world, and they didn't have the foresight to predict that there might be adversaries, and thus build (in retrospect, quite simple) protections in.
Also, those old timers were wrong about drive by wire, there is zero evidence that it's any less safe than physical linkages.
One of the reasons it would have been extremely difficult to predict, is that the phenomenon of consumer devices having a general purpose computer (and that this might be connected to the rest of the car), much less one networked in any sense, as its interface is pretty new.
[edit: added analogy to the internet]
I guarantee you that engineers warned PM's about this kind of thing from the start.
>Also, those old timers were wrong about drive by wire, there is zero evidence that it's any less safe than physical linkages.
Let's distinguish drive-by-wire from FADEC (or what amounts to a poor-version of FADEC). An electronic throttle is fine. An electronic throttle that cannot be overridden by a casual user not. It's the implementation that's problematic.
What would they define 'other systems' as? Back then carphones were pretty new, and the height of technology, and a car 'computer' was a trip mileage counter and mpg calculator. Amy definition would either be rooted in the technology of the time, and therefore not handle new breakthroughs and inventions, or be so vague as to be unenforceable, I suspect. They would have to be pretty far forward thinking to have envisaged high bandwidth Internet connections or wireless data links, as inputs to the car systems, let alone the amount of compute power that is now routine in vehicles.
The sorts of things that are going to enforce safety here are going to be produced by the car industry engineering standards bodies eventually, but it will take time. Many of the concepts, like CAN-bus firewalls, data diodes and filters are already present in high-assurance avionics networks and (post STUXNET) in process control systems. Note that it took STUXNET for people to realise that vulnerability, now the industry is working on solutions, but so far no power stations or chemical plants have exploded. We are in the same place with vehicle security now.
And who checks these people's work? How do we make sure they don't risk outlawing ABS and ESP before they're invented?
For a relevant case study, compare and contrast with how heavy regulation, also plenty of forward-looking stuff, totally failed to predict or prevent the financial crash.
The, there's the issue of how the industry would actually adhere to these speculative regulations. You'd have plausibly millions of pages of regulation to evaluate every new development against. In practise, this means the lawyers are running the show. Just like in the banks.
Also, before your righteous anger gets the better of you, let's remember that nobody has actually been hurt due to these problems yet, except of course the manufacturer who must issue extreme expensive recalls. In the meantime, Toyota built cars with a gas pedal that stuck - this issue actually killed people. It was a purely mechanical problem - would these hypothetical forward-looking regulators have caught that issue?
Finally, I'm not one to throw around words like "communism" where they don't apply, and communists certainly didn't and don't care one bit for consumer safety or comfort - but severe overconfidence in the ability of government to plan, predict and prevent things is a central problem with communism.
I won't even bother to fight your strawmen (the financial crash could not be helped by better laws, really?), tbh it's just boring. You are right, why have laws at all? Car manufacturers are so enlightened, they obviously work for the greater good rather than simple profit, I apologize for my stupid remark.
Have a good day.
Not sprayed with gratuitous ad-hominems, not really.
> bringing up how forward-looking government regulation failed in other cases is pretty relevant.
I struggled to consider it relevant, considering how it's widely accepted that reduction in regulation is one of the main causes of the recent financial crash. Forward-looking regulation was there and was removed. I think that particular example doesn't make the point he thinks it makes.
> And never was the idea mentioned that these things should not be governed at all
It was basically inferred. If you take his points to the logical conclusions, there is no point in regulating the car industry, they hire the best minds so they will know what to do.
> "Good" advancements can be just as restricted as "bad" advancements
Of course; but it's extremely difficult to prove whether the advantages of outlawing both outweigh the advantages of allowing both. So we came up with this rule that "we legislate only after shit happens". Is it crazy to think this arrangement could be sub-optimal, and there might be a better compromise?
It wasn't a bad design for the 1990s - it's a bad design for now, however.
There is the acceleration module, then there is a wireless networking me dule, and there is a physical wire connecting them.
Very shitty, very dangerous design.
And then you add a radio, and a knob under the steering wheel to control it, and think - hey, I have this handy bus I can reuse so that they talk with each other. And suddenly, your radio talks to your brakes.
I don't think it's malicious design. More likely stupid one, or just a result of people being used to treating car hardware as trusted environment - where obsessing over security is just a waste of resources. It's just that when you introduce an Internet-connected device to that environment, it's not trusted anymore.
The issue is that frequently systems like OnStar sit on both buses, because they are used for things like engine diagnostics. If you investigate you'll notice that every single one of these car hacking attacks starts somewhere, pivots to an OnStar like system, then can control the car.
Doesn't really make your point less true, but fits perfectly in the features over security mindset.
Don't contribute to malice what could be explained by stupidity. Don't contribute to stupidity what could be explained by greed.
ECU's have no business being integrated into infotainment systems. It's fine to have a physical wire that can be connected for diagnostics, but don't have then permanently connected by default. Just don't.
edit: just read the article (doh for commenting before reading) and this attack is different from the previous ones. This one uses a feature that was built into the cars purposely for unlocking the vehicle and controlling the engine. That feature seems monumentally dumb from the outset - and very much implemented by design.
- Murder for hire. - Killing political opponents. - Another country could use it to kill our leaders.
I'm looking forward to self-driving cards but my only real fear is a bug being used to kill people in the manner I just described.
Even if the hardware is secure against a script kiddie hacker, it'll never be secure against a government backdoor.
Imagine the power that someone like Nixon would have as president today. It's scary.
"When the president does something, that means that it is not illegal" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYdJqSG3K6c
There's such an obvious way to make money on them I'm surprised it isn't happening yet - if you have a zero-day for a car, just make a deal with your lawyer friend, that you'll crash some poor schmuck's car and your friend will help the victim sue car manufacturer for $shitton, which you'll split between the two of you.
I'm sure plenty of international "agencies" would pay very good money to be able to exploit these bugs. Gotta take out somebody driving a GM car? No sweat!