Anyone know more precisely what he's talking about? The article doesn't specify.
>> The V850 controller software was built to only listen to the CAN bus and not write commands to it.
If the hardware was intently designed for sniff only, you'd think a simple uni-directional buffer between the V850 and CAN bus would have mitigated this risk in one fell swoop. Maybe it's hinde sight bias, but directly interfacing a complex, OTA-enabled embedded accessory to a bus used for safety-critical control sounds about as sensible as strapping a Raspberry Pi to a flight control computer's 1553 bus and thinking it's all gravy because the former's software is designed to "only listen".
That being said, I understood from a former Delphi engineer who designed engine control modules that there's a pretty strict and expensive approval process for electronics in the automobile industry, and reliability predictions are taken quite seriously. I suspect even if an engineer were to design in a true read-only interface, it'd probably get nerfed during design review as a consequence of lacking traceability to a hard requirement.