Hacker News Reader

Comment by jandrese | Hacker News Reader

If you ever want to turn your hair grey prematurely consider an attacker that infiltrates Tesla's Full Self Driving development and adds a "crash into the nearest X at maximum acceleration" hidden subroutine that can be triggered via an over-the-air signal. Millions of Teslas suddenly deciding to point at the nearest power pole or transformer and flooring the accelerator in the hopes of crashing hard enough to start a battery fire.

A mere decade ago this was pure science fiction, but over the past few years it has become a possibility.

View on HN

This has been a concern for well over a decade, and self driving cars only changes it a little bit. You can google "remote car hacking 2010" or earlier to find great examples and reports of this going back pretty far. It's been awhile since this was science fiction.

Basically every modern car can have software that says "slam the gas pedal as far as possible". Combine that with cars that are heavily integrated into their infotainment system or even include built in wifi and you've got the "over the air signal" covered.

Telling the car to aim and steer at a specific type of object is something that has only recently become possible. Computer vision has come a long way in the past few years, especially computer vision built into automobiles.

I also believe that drive by wire systems are going to become even more commonplace in the future and eliminate the possibility of a driver attempting to muscle the car back into control.

A sufficiently hard left would get most cars into either a barrier or a head on collision, no aiming required

The attacker just needs to make appropriate modifications to some open source library or framework that Tesla FSD software uses. Of course, these modifications would be made by people who have been contributing to the project for many years and have built up impeccable reputations for writing safe, reliable and secure code.

There was a similar scenario in the recent film Leave the World Behind

Not even a malicious actor. Just a Crowdstrike like bad Tesla update.

We have no way of knowing whether sun h an implant already exists, wait inf to be turned on at the moment of maximum damage. Luckily I have no hair to turn gray.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com