OVMS: Open source electric vehicle remote monitoring, diagnosis and control | Hacker News Reader

OVMS: Open source electric vehicle remote monitoring, diagnosis and control

openvehicles.com

99 pointsBHSPitMonkey14 comments

Unfortunately for the 2023 Nissan Leaf has a CAN gateway module. Basically, it's like a firewall or gateway to filter out CAN writing commands commands so you can't directly talk to the car with open tools through the OBD-II. Basically, it's a read-only port that's only when the car is powered on. Unfortunately a lot of cars are now starting to do this. I guess I'm gonna have to make a modified version of CAN tap cable for an unrestricted OBD-II port. :( https://docs.openvehicles.com/en/latest/components/vehicle_n...

It's frustrating but completely expected. OEMs are realizing that telemetry and post-sale software subscriptions are their next major revenue stream. Locking down the CAN bus behind a gateway is always framed as a 'security feature', but the real goal is killing third-party observability and locking you into their proprietary ecosystems. The fact that we have to splice into CAN tap cables on hardware we fully own just to read our own telemetry is absurd.

What do you expect, give everyone connecting _root_ permissions to your whole powertrain? It has to be protected somehow.

Yes. If you don’t have root you don’t own it.

Protected from _what_ and _who_, exactly?

Are we protecting the owner of the vehicle from fully accessing the vehicle that they own? On my 2011 car I can hook into the OBDB port under the dash and have full access to everything but the alarm system (requires its a separate programmer), and it's safe: drivetrain modifications require the engine to be powered off to apply.

Or is it theft we're protecting everyone from? The main (technological) cause of which lately has been the one-CANbus-to-rule-them-all idiocy that has taken over car makers, including putting the alarm and locking systems on the same unmoderated, unauthenticated CAN bus as everything else in the car. So a quick light pop and you're able to talk to every system in the car. We're back to solving a problem that didn't need to exist in the first place, if car makers had just thought this through before rolling it out to everything.

The correct solution here is to not further restrict the personal freedom of property owners but instead to stop designing and building systems that require stupid, and somehow always dystopian, solutions to even more stupid problems.

Ok so what do you propose? Split the CAN bus into multiple, put security-critical parts on its own isolated network that you can't write to... Well now you've made the situation even worse for the owner than it currently is. Almost anything interesting on the bus can be considered security critical, so the owners would get access to nothing but boring telemetry....exactly what they get through the read-only gateway.

Proper security requires authentication and freedom-preserving authentication has to have owner-controlled credentials. That's the only way forward. Who cares where they run which bus. Encrypt/authenticate everything and give the owner a way to set their own key. Now we just need to figure out a way to make this a law...

I own a Hyundai Ioniq 5. There seems to be documentation for OVMS support: https://docs.openvehicles.com/en/latest/components/vehicle_h... but very little documentation for how to get up and running or even where to obtain hardware for my car. $350 plus a few bucks a month for a low data SIM is actually worth it for me for privacy, and Hyundai charges $100 a year for buggy software with less features. I hope this takes off.

I imagine it just plugs into the OBD port? My i5 seems to keep that port powered even when the car is off so be extra wary of your 12v's life

I'm planning to attempt this soon!

Not a new project, but one that's relevant to a lot of recent discussions of privacy-invasive connected systems built into modern cars

The hardware is US$345. A little step for an odb bridge?

The PCB images are the, but sadly just images, no privet PCB layout format is provided.

I would think you could do this with a comma.ai device too.

Has anybody tried it for an F-150 Lightning

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