The Big Tesla Hack: A hacker gained control over the entire fleet
electrek.co
electrek.co
If this hack had been exploited Tesla market capitalization would've taken a multi-million if not billion dollar hit. And here they are, paying out relative chump change to a guy that alerted them to it.
But that's the point. Who's out there that would exploit this because they thought $50,000 wasn't worth it, but would change their minds for $1,000,000?
Realistically there's only two types of people who would maliciously exploit something of this magnitude: the mentally unstable (people who just like to cause chaos), and state-sponsored actors attempting to disrupt other nations. Neither of those groups seem particularly likely to change their mind for an extra zero or two.
The "pay more than the black market will" model works for smaller bugs, but for ones like this that would immediately get every three letter agency on the planet trying to find you, the $50,000 isn't a valuation of the worth of that bug report, it's a gratuity. And for the average bug reporter, that's an extremely nice one.
Can they pay more? Yes, absolutely. Should they? Probably, yeah. Do they have any reason to? No.
The solution to this is to have legal requirements for security, and extremely heavy fines for having released dangerous software (some portion of this fine financing a similar bug bounty program). Take the option of how much money to hand out away from the companies, and they'll be incentivised to take security much more seriously in the first place.
Of course, this requires lawmakers to have a basic understanding of technology, so we're at least 20 years and 3 major catastrophes away from getting anywhere near that actually occurring.
Yeah, they do. It's a self declared measure of how seriously they take their security. They valued avoiding the takeover of their fleet at 0.0000125% of their market cap.
The reason I left lastpass was because the bug bounty for a bug that could expose all of everybody's passwords just by visiting a website was, like, about $1k. The company became dead to me in a split second and I wanted out immediately.
....and it's not doing too well these days, from what I can tell.
It's kind of a treasure trove to be able to read all passwords from a user of lastpass simply by showing them a website.
It made me think that the next zero day on lastpass would probably be sold to someone else.
Reason your way through it all the way, and you'll see why real vulnerabilities sold on darker markets are paid in tranches, and why nobody pays real money for one-off serversides.
The article says the max bug bounty was increased to $15k eventually, so it was even less than that at the time even though they gave him $50k. Kudos to whoever at Tesla stepped up and gave him extra.
I'd seriously consider not reporting something like that for $15k unless I was worried about someone else exploiting it and having a trail of access logs lead back to me. People that discover bugs like that with massive destructive potential must be on every TLA list on the planet afterwards and I don't think that's worth $15k.
$1 million is life changing and puts you into a higher social class. IE: Poor == probably a criminal. Rich == probably not a criminal. It's sad, but that's the way it works and I'd rather be rich if I were on a short list of "dangerous" hackers.
If you're able to sell a Tesla vulnerability to the supply chain of a state-level actor, it's probably because they're already actively exploiting Tesla vulnerabilities. By the time random discoveries like this are part of the supply chain, the supply chain is already chugging along.
I think a good rule of thumb is that no serious actor --- not a state, not a crime ring, not a competitor --- does speculative engineering to accept and operationalize a third-party vulnerability. If they're buying, it's because they already have an operational infrastructure to drop the bug into. When you're figuring out the dollar value a vulnerability has, start by telling yourself the story about the entity that already has a bug just like it, is exploiting it for some articulable purpose, and wants a replacement or 10 in the hopper for later. (I don't think this is a perfectly reliable heuristic, but it's where most of this kind of thinking should start).
I didn't mean they'd want your help. I meant you might end up on some hacker watchlist. You'll get extra attention and scrutiny from government agencies which wouldn't have much upside IMO. Maybe at airports you'll be randomly selected more often so security agencies can look at your devices and try to clone them.
Would you really feel 100% comfortable going to China after being in the news as the person that could have controlled the entire Tesla fleet? I think there are hard to measure social costs for gaining that kind of notoriety and current bug bounty programs aren't properly compensating for them.
Of course there's many other ways you could exploit such a bug, but in the context of a "multi-billion dollar" event, it's really only The Big One that's in frame here.
Car manufacturers do plenty of shady things, but this would be ridiculously over the top. I don't think that would be a serious concern at all.
Makes me think of the recent Twitter account take-overs. The amateur attackers acquired access which could have caused enormous damage, and used it to scam ~$100,000. The difference between $50k and $1m in bounty could have turned them towards responsible disclosure.
(That said: they probably hoped to scam much more. And they got caught. And the way they obtained access was probably way out of the scope of a bug bounty program / the law.)
That kind of incentive has led to underhanded behaviour in the past, so it wouldn't be surprising to see it happen again.
And no, I'm not a hedge fund. Just an investor. Not going to be funding hackers.
lmao... this hack just underscores how exceedingly lame Tesla truly is.
I don't know if this is strictly legal either, but definitely more plausible deniability.
Presumably you're into the system by the time you've discovered the exploit, so you're on the wrong side of the CFAA in the US and IMO the law would come down on you _hard_ if you acted in bad faith like that.
Even failing to report it might ruffle enough feathers for the company to use their political connections to have you prosecuted. I suspect that's also part of the reason the bounties are so low.
"Oh, we discovered that 2 years ago, but the bug bounty program didn't make it worth reporting. Want to buy a security audit?"
They must need to know something about it in order to verify that it does the malicious thing correctly. It's hard enough to get code right when there's a whole team of people who know exactly what it's supposed to do.
For the moment, rather than re-having this discussion, we can just note that bounty prices are what they are, and that no tech firm pays "existential" rates for new vulnerabilities (except, perhaps, Uber, where literally everyone involved in that story is now in the federal criminal court system).
But the fact that $50000 is chump change for Tesla does not mean it's chump change to the recipient.
That's maybe true for founders, but not really for hired executives:
> One major consideration that goes into how much a CEO should be paid is what other companies are paying. Compensation committees benchmark CEO pay against a self-selected peer group -- often 12 to 20 companies that may be of similar size and complexity, and have similar business models, according to Robin Ferracone, CEO of Farient Advisors, an executive compensation consulting firm.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/10/24/success/ceo-pay-packages/inde...
These days companies that take their security seriously are hopefully harder to exploit. If it takes someone a couple months of slow fuzzing/etc to find an exploit that is probably below market for the persons skills here in the US.
Maybe a part of these bug bounties should be not only how critical the bug is, but some metric of how much work the individual put in before finding the problem.
How do we classify what constitutes work to find any particular bug?
> He didn’t end up getting a new Tesla, but the automaker awarded him a special $50,000 bug report reward — several times higher than the max official bug reward limit:
You're looking at the $5,000 bounty awarded for exposing Supercharger-related data that Tesla "didn't want [...] out there", which is obviously a much less severe issue than remote control of the entire fleet.
It would also align hackers interest with the businesses they are helping secure.
Check out the stock price of Bank of America after their servers got rooted several years back. Or that Breach that Deloitte had. How about Cloudflare?
Most people would far prefer cash
Bounty payers enjoy a hefty discount when they waive their right to prosecute.
That said, I think they have some hiking/trekking oriented products which could cause problems if you were relying on them.
The headline "electric car fleet hacked" is a lot scarier than "smart watches hacked".
Then again, maybe people really don't give a shit about this stuff, and these bounties are priced correctly.
I think the high likelihood of being caught and going to prison is also already a pretty big deterrent for people. Just think of all the challenges of actually pulling a hack like this off without being caught. For one thing, just the poking around that led to the discovery of the vulnerability has probably already logged a bunch of potentially suspicious activity linked to this guy's VIN number. So even if he sold it to someone else who did the hack he could probably be caught already. If he tried to orchestrate the hack himself, not only does he need to not be caught directly, but he'd also have to make a very large, very suspicious short trade right before the hack without it being traced back to him. Plus there's always a possibility that Tesla would have been able to lock him out quickly anyway or had some other kind of rate-limiting or other measures in place to prevent significant damage, or that even if he pulled off the hack perfectly the stock price wouldn't drop as much as expected.
I think it's more likely that the person who reported the vulnerability would have done the right thing regardless of any bounty.
I also wonder when something becomes a "hack". Some systems are so insecure you can almost accidentally exploit them. In this case the API just required an ID for access. How would someone know if that was by design, or a mistake?
As soon as you access something you're not supposed to. If a house is left unlocked and you walk in and take a look around, you're trespassing and it's a crime. And of course if you cause any damage or steal something, that's an even bigger crime.
Except with hacking, the punishments can be even more severe relative to the actual crime committed, because almost nobody in the legal system will understand the details of what happened so they can make you seem as dangerous as they want. Just look at Aaron Swartz and countless other examples of the heavy charges that have been given out for very minor, borderline cases of "hacking".
We've been making motors (electric or combustion) for over a hundred years, and gotten pretty damn good at making them safe and reliable. Same thing with stoves, HVAC equipment, small appliances, etc. These are all mature technologies that we can practically trust our lives with.
Internet-connected smart vehicles aren't a mature technology. Not in the sense of this being the win2k era of that tech, but that our assumptions about how to build these systems might be fundamentally wrong. I don't know if it will ever be safe enough to trust human lives to it.
Until then, I'll only want to buy cars made before 2010.
I often hear this kind of thing and am really surprised by it. Specifically for the tech in vehicles example, it seems like a real double standard. Around 37,000 people in the US die in car accidents every year[1]. That's 100 people a DAY. There is a huge cost to not adopting new safety measures, even if it depends on immature tech, and that needs to be factored against the potential new unknown risks.
Driving to work is almost certainly the riskiest thing you do most days. I find it plausible that people 50 years from now will think that the cars we drove before 2010 were unconscionable death traps.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motor_vehicle_fatality_rate_in...
However, when you are considering system risk (e.g. that a bad actor could crash 100k cars at the same time) the worst case outcome could be much worse than the mean outcome.
That statement doesn't seem meaningful to me in a vacuum, without further qualification. It's not at all guaranteed that safety features have net benefits, either measured financially or in estimated human welfare. Have you noticed there are a lot of high tech safety features in modern cars, but insurance companies are selective about which ones receive discounts?
If self-driving cars are substantially safer, insurance companies will be able to give substantial discounts. I vaguely remember Tesla making noises about providing insurance to their own customers, but I don't know if it came to anything.
Depends on the feature you're talking about. With self-driving cars, for example, there is no evidence that they are any safer than human drivers. In fact, it is possible that they are more dangerous than human drivers.
An immature relationship might be based on selfish interests, compounded with power struggles, boundary issues, jealousy, spying, and a little rage and stockholm syndrome thrown in for fun.
A mature relationship is based on trust and mutual respect. It does not concern itself with knowing every detail or trepidation regarding other suitors. The relationship is there because it is valued and there are willing participants.
Now... internet connected devices.
We need safe updates with transparent documentation as to all the changes, with hardware enforced feature switches. Forcing them to go through an approval process doesn't sound bad until you've met regulators like the FAA -- or Apple.
If you allow users to approve and roll back updates then there is some ability to recover after bad updates. Of course, you don't want theives to be able to roll back to a vulnerable release, but you can require the master owner key & code for rollback.
I wonder how long it will be before we start to see legal or regulatory interventions in this area. Mandatory self-updating and phone-home functionality is rapidly infecting technologies we rely on every day, from our cars to our home computers to our TV sets.
This always-connected, always-updated approach inevitably introduces some risks. It often causes intrusions into privacy or brings changes after purchase that users of these technologies don't necessarily want.
Competition in these markets is evidently insufficient to provide alternatives for those who don't want anything to do with this modern culture. I don't believe that is limited to a small group of eccentric tinfoil-hat fans any more.
Hopefully it won't take some sort of widespread disaster to wake the politicians up to the dangers here, though given the past performance of the political class around the world when it comes to technology issues, I'm not particularly optimistic.
Consumers don't have a voice here, and (given the Democrats' record) I don't see that changing regardless of who wins the upcoming election.
Not long IMO. It'll be sold as a safety measure, but the real purpose will be to limit competition. I think it's similar to "warranty void if removed" stickers, but I'm worried we're not going to get the same pragmatic legislation that makes those ignorable.
Something has gone terribly wrong with modern technology.
Gotta remember, that every day people entrust their lives to lots of software and electronic systems. Of course, it's important to have reasonable security measure taken, but just because something's electronic doesn't make that a bad thing.
Most modern cars don't connect to the internet.
"The first thing that happens is nothing. Your smartphone stays black while you swipe at it and press the various buttons. Has the battery gone flat? You could have sworn you left the house with a full charge. Now you start to wonder how you’ll get your car out of the parking structure without a working mobile. That thought hadn’t occurred to you before. It’s the least of your worries. Still fussing with your smartphone, you gradually begin to realise you’re not the only one having this problem. In fact, it would seem that everyone waiting at the pick-up area is in various stages of agitation with their own smartphones. Some are pressing odd combinations of buttons, trying to reset the little beasties. Others, who have clearly had rough days now made worse, start to swear at their dead screens, as if cursing might shock them into life. It’s weird, and almost a bit funny. For a brief moment. The first smashing can be felt more than heard, a subsonic strike something like a vast drumhead being struck with a metre-wide mallet, but so quick, you barely even notice it until it’s over. The second one, however, isn’t far behind, and it’s a bit louder. That second thump gives away its location — whatever it was seems to be happening quite close by — in the direction of the parking structure. At just this moment a car cruises through the pick-up zone at full speed, barreling along at least 100 kmh. It’s only because of some very fast reactions that no one gets hurt as it passes by. As it zooms past, you notice there’s no one behind the wheel. Before you have any time to process that, another huge thump nearby causes a section of the barrier wall of an upper floor of the concrete parking structure to shear off. A pile of rubble falls to the ground not very far away from you."
The first part is OK (except author forgot about "fire exit" laws, so the mall doors would not be locked)
The second part, the one which describes "consensus" system from technical standpoint, is wrong. The protection does not work this way. As in, it can surely be implemented, but it has no benefits that author claims and would not protect from stuxnet-like "viruses" (sic!) at all.
The third part, where the bitcoin is mentioned, is outright science fiction.
The brand that could cause the most damage is probably Bosch, a major automotive component manufacturer.
This is also why it's always very, very wrong to compare potential faults of automated cars to humans as in "the automated car is X percent safer!", becuase it ignores the fact that mistakes in automated systems, at least as they are built now, are highly correlated.
If there is one bug in an ML system that is rolled out to an entire fleet that results in an unknown weather condition leading to fatal crashes you may create mass carnage.
Human driver errors are not correlated like this, which makes them much more robust as an ecosystem.
According to NHSTA, 144 drunk-driving deaths on July 4, compared to 36 on average: https://www.bactrack.com/blogs/expert-center/35042821-the-mo...
I would say that's mass carnage.
Human driver errors not correlated my arse!
The threshold issue is remote updates of car software. And Tesla had made that more mainstream and attractive to other manufacturers.
State-sponsored hackers are not going to ignore the opportunity. They probably have the capability already, in dozens of countries, and are just waiting for orders from the leaders. If war is starting, the order will be given. Sanctions could be enough to trigger it.
I could see arguing with the inevitability of the exploit -- Win95 botnets seemed much more inevitable to me than this Tesla mothership threat does. But it seems like you're arguing that they will both have similar impact if exploited. That doesn't make sense to me, because they're completely different threats, but it's possible I'm misunderstanding your argument in some way.
Imagine even 0.1% cars being controlled, the mayhem and loss of life that they can cause is just immense.
Power plants are also dangerous targets in a similar sense, but hopefully there is network separation for control services.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2016/08/jeep-hackers-return-high-speed...
Been a while since I looked in the details but from what I recall only very limited, well scrutinized communication is allowed to bridge the Ethernet subsystem over to the CAN bus.
I guess those risks are a bit like nuclear launch risks. Someone, somewhere (that controls the right key) could unleash an enormous accident. You just hope the system as a whole has enough redundancy for it to be sufficiently unlikely. In nuclear arms technology we have multiple authorizations required for launches. Then of course the underlying system has to be robust enough so none of those measures can be bypassed.
There is no fundamental barrier that I can see -- we know how to build incredibly robust systems using methods like formal verification of software and just thorough quality assurance and testing. In a way, much of the world is already exposed to those kinds of risks: most individuals's phones, laptops and even industrial computers can be remotely updated and incapacitated, exposing a risk of generalized trouble.
The adequate amount of resources to be allocated on those risky but extremely remote scenarios is what's important. I think there needs to be oversight guaranteeing every system is getting verification, testing and attention proportional to risk for society. The usual punitive incentives don't work very well for those cases. I don't think we have any agencies with this wide of an outlook currently.
And probably other manufacturers will use their own designs.
Unfortunately, this is one of those issues where we have to be lucky every time, and the bad guys only have to be lucky once. Given the number of different manufacturers whose systems have demonstrably been compromised in the past, the odds of avoiding catastrophic compromises in the future as cars gain more autonomous features don't look great here.
One plausible alternative is that we don't deploy systems like this, which have the ability to cause widespread damage including loss of life in moments, until we have worked out how to secure them properly against a single point of catastrophic failure like that. There are things that could be done to mitigate that threat in the meantime.
This is set against the knowledge that existing human-driven vehicles are involved in many tragic accidents per year, also causing widespread damage including loss of life. But there are other things that can be done to limit the damage there as well, without relying on autonomous vehicles as a silver bullet.
Most vehicles won’t let you reprogram the firmware without power cycling the car. Disable sensing of a crash is definitely its own ECM that is on a high priority bus. I am assuming your common <$40k car. When you head into bmw, merc Benz land this statement changes slightly.
> Villainess: I want every with chip with a 0-day exploit in a two mile radius around that motorcade now.
> Computer guy: There's over a thousand of 'em
> Villainess: Hack ‘em all. It’s zombie time.
> [zombie cars drive around causing mayhem]
Both the Prius[1] and the Model 3[2] had similar software bugs related to their anti-lock brakes. Both companies had a software fix a few days after the bugs were discovered. Tesla's fix was pushed out immediately to every vehicle. Toyota couldn't push out a fix. They had to issue a recall and have a technician update the software whenever that car ended up being serviced. How many months or more likely years did it take for every Prius to be updated with the software? How many miles were driven in cars that were known to have faulty brake software because it was hard to update them? You have to consider situations like this when discuss banning remote updating.
[1] - https://www.networkworld.com/article/2245704/toyota-to-recal...
[2] - https://www.wired.com/story/tesla-model3-braking-software-up...
Isn't that exactly what we're doing? If someone pushes out a malicious change, do you know how long it would take for that change to propagate to the entire Toyota fleet?
It wouldn't.
This gives all the more incentive to get the software correct in the first place. The model of "get the software as bug-free as possible upfront using stringent processes, testing, formal methods, and not using software in the first place when it's not actually needed" is better than the model of "put software into as many components as possible to make it shiny and get the software good enough to release before our competitors and play whack-a-mole on the bugs later through updates". Instantaneous updates make it easier for an attacker to take control of the update infrastructure and push an update that will trigger a mass-crash of cars during rush hour. When people have to asynchronously take the car to dealerships over many months, it makes this attack harder to go undetected.
I think you've just identified the root cause of at least one set of problems. The essential control systems in a vehicle should ideally be separated from other vehicle functions to prevent interference, whether accidental or deliberate, from compromising vehicle safety. The approach now being taken by manufacturers with their always-online, increasingly automated cars may be undermining that separation, without necessarily having adequate safeguards in place to ensure safety and reliability are maintained.
Anyway, this is moot in most cars, as they don't have sold driving software anyway.
In this thread, I'm simply observing that there can't be a clear separation between control systems and information systems if we're going to achieve these kinds of autonomous functionality. We need a more nuanced solution.
- know of the existence of Bosch,
- be completely ignorant of the company being an absolute giant in the engineering space, and
- be confident enough that they're some tiny power drill manufacturer to mock them publicly without pausing to look them up
It's like hearing someone say "the guys who make the Xbox are providing cloud services for the Pentagon? Who is running that ship lol".
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Meanwhile there's the company who took Mobileye's LKA, which was already in cars with the same hardware but not continuously enabled because of inherent flaws related to non-moving objects... and turned it on all the time so they could call it Autopilot.
Then it killed some people because of the flaws that kept other manufacturers from using it the way they were.
And they're writing the software for self-driving cars? Who's running that ship lol
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In a better world people with experience with safety critical stuff and the culture for it would partner with companies like Tesla to create something like a "plug in" system for SDCs. Where the safety guys could focus on defining a minimal viable envelope of operation the same way existing ABS and ESC systems mesh with drivers. Something like if the car is less than 100ms from crashing intervene separately of "normal" object avoidance
(And before someone nitpicks that's an arbitrary number of ms, yes there's no "isCrashing" variable, and yes it would be hard work to define how SDCs would handle intervention, but people crashing into parked firetrucks is worthwhile "hard thing" to solve)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_Aerospace_%26_Technolog...
It would be misleading to label an article from three days ago from "2017," particularly as this is the first reporting about this ever.
From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24327485, so no NDA.
Which is pretty much the opposite like Tesla operates.
This was the biggest line in the story, for me. You can spend $100k+ on a vehicle and you can’t even have security to protect it that was standard FIVE YEARS AGO.
Lack of 2FA is a showstopper for services an order of magnitude less expensive than a vehicle. Tesla simply must not care about security very much, a fact reflected in their low bug bounty prices.
> Someone who appeared to be working at Tesla posted anonymously about how they didn’t want the data out there.
> Hughes responded that he would be happy to discuss it with them.
> 20 minutes later, he was on a conference call with the head of the Supercharger network and the head of software security at Tesla.
> They kindly explained to him that they would prefer for him not to share the data, which was technically accessible through the vehicles. Hughes then agreed to stop scraping and sharing the Supercharger data.
> After reporting his server exploit through Tesla’s bug reporting service, he received a $5,000 reward for exposing the vulnerability.
What's the difference between this and what Uber's former Security Chief was charged with?
And that's how we get the Zombie Apocalypse, kids!
That's not even considering the major privacy issues that come with such vehicles.
Even a hard core luddite gets worn down.
I understand the security and privacy implications of always on internet connected GPS tracking and remote control.
However, an authorized connection to the server is not authorization to make any arbitrary request on the server.
It happens for the same reason that many games get MAX_INT high scores at launch.
Maybe it depends on perspective, with the manufacturer seeing owners as outside forces, from which their vehicles are autonomous? Rolled up with the liability question is the question of who does control the vehicles and who they are autonomous from.
The car is autonomous but can't read your mind, you have to provide locations to drive to. These can come from a remote server.