5 ms·

I think it will take a true catastrophe before anyone really understands just how vulnerable the Internet is. Or how bad an idea it is to connect anything and

• ElijahLynn 9y ago
  Yeah, I think vehicle software is going to be a nightmare. No way are they going to keep patching software after 5 years or maybe 10. I can imagine that a 20 year old vehicle will just be recycled into scrap because it has been compromised.
  • maxerickson 9y ago
    In the US most vehicles are already recycled for scrap before they are 20 years old. Average age has just ticked up to 11.6 years: http://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973/average-age-of-vehicles-on-road-hits-11.6-years http://www.autonews.com/article/20161122/RETAIL05/161129973/...
• ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  I personally don't really intend to buy any cars with a wireless network connection. I don't know how much longer that will be possible. But at least requiring physical access will help a lot. (And prevent a true horror: Someone figuring out how to make malware spread from car to car.) Regarding "IoT": There's no reason your light switches should talk to the Internet, even for home automation purposes.
  • mark-r 9y ago
    I'm having a new A/C and furnace installed. About half the proposals we received had wifi-connected thermostats, and I said no thank you.
    • ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      I love having a connected thermostat, mind you. But I'm using INSTEON, which is controlled locally by my computer. Rather than trusting the security of a random IoT device, I ensure nothing can get to my devices except through my computer.
  • Silhouette 9y ago
    I personally don't really intend to buy any cars with a wireless network connection. I don't know how much longer that will be possible. Not very. In many areas, it is either already a regulatory requirement or about to become one that any new vehicle implements an automatic system that will notify emergency services in the event of an accident where no-one on board is able to call for help, sending information about the location of the vehicle and the nature of the accident. That inevitably requires both remote communications capability and integration with some of the other safety-critical systems in the vehicle. While this particular application may be a worthy goal that will genuinely save lives, the architecture it implies will inevitably also be more at risk of security vulnerabilities than an entirely disconnected vehicle.
    • jamespo 9y ago
      Do you have more details on where this is mandatory currently?
      • gpvos 9y ago
        From 31 March 2018 in the EU.
• WalterBright 9y ago
  Put the car's firmware in ROM. Power cycle the electronics, and the malware is gone.
  • throwanem 9y ago
    Now it takes a dealership visit and a supply chain to get a firmware update. Good luck getting that to fly in the era of day-one patches and 1.0 betas.
    • rangibaby 9y ago
      Why the fk does a car need a firmware update regularly enough that going to a dealership is a problem? I honestly find myself wanting dumber everything these days.
      • hueving 9y ago
        Tesla pushing out car features OTA seems to be quite popular.
        • tonyedgecombe 9y ago
          Until it's exploited, then we will be wondering how we could be so dumb.
    • WalterBright 9y ago
      Not necessarily. A physical write-enable switch can work, too. (Not a software switch!)
      • dredmorbius 9y ago
        Spring-loaded. See the SR-71 fuel aft transfer switch. Maintaining a forward CG keeps the bird in the air. Control is intentionally manual. https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/1/1-62.php https://www.sr-71.org/blackbird/manual/1/1-62.php
  • 9y ago
• closeparen 9y ago
  It doesn't need to be on the internet to be catastrophically exploited. Most buildings have zero defense against tailgating, let alone sophisticated covert entry. Most organizations contain people who can be tricked, bribed, or accidentally hire an adversary. Disconnection can stop drive-by malware, people trawling for additions to their botnet collections. Someone who wants to launch a coordinated attack will have no problem getting behind the firewall or across the air gap at enough interesting networks to cause serious harm. We have to actually write secure software.
  • flukus 9y ago
    > Most organizations contain people who can be tricked, bribed, or accidentally hire an adversary. I've been thinking about this all week. I discovered a fairly big vulnerability in our software the other day that allows anyone in the company to access data they shouldn't, not national secret level data, but enough that it could be somewhat valuable. We also have a number of people of a certain nationality that's somewhat hostile to the west, many of those people are programmers. How would you differentiate incompetence that lead to the vulnerability from maliciousness that intentionally caused it?
    • uptown 9y ago
      So you're saying because you employ people from a country that's hostile to the west you trust them less than people from your own country? Sounds like the vulnerability isn't your primary problem.
      • flukus 9y ago
        Hostile and known for subterfuge. Most are probably alright but one in particular also had a run at politics with a fair bit of financial backing from this country.
• finolex1 9y ago
  The Singapore government implemented something similar a year earlier - disconnecting all government office computers from the internet. It's inconvenient, but in certain high risk use cases (power plants, airports, etc.) it might be essential because there will always be vulnerabilities in a system, especially when people are involved, no matter how well the systems are monitored.
  • knz 9y ago
    > airport Airports have everything from huge IoT systems managing the climate of the terminals, thousands of monitors for public information, controls for automated baggage handling, traffic/parking management sensors, vast sewer systems with sensors to manage storm/sanitary/glycol recovery/water, security systems (tens of thousands of cameras/doors being monitored), and then hundreds of smaller systems doing everything from managing ground transportation through to emergency dispatch. I'm not sure it's even feasible to air gap all of that - the loss of productivity and additional cost would be far greater than the perceived security risks. Airports typically don't have large IT departments either, they outsource much of the work to consultants and cloud solutions. Critical systems should be, and are, air gapped but if something took out some of the systems connected to the internet it would be chaos. One random aside... I work at an airport and did a tour of the ATC tower when I started. One of my first questions was how do they handle a loss of critical systems for landing planes. They proudly whipped out a massive signaling light (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_light_signals https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_light_signals) and explained how they use it. I actually found it quite reassuring that despite all of the technology they clearly had contingency plans in place.
    • zeveb 9y ago
      > Airports have everything from huge IoT systems managing the climate of the terminals, thousands of monitors for public information, controls for automated baggage handling, traffic/parking management sensors, vast sewer systems with sensors to manage storm/sanitary/glycol recovery/water, security systems (tens of thousands of cameras/doors being monitored), and then hundreds of smaller systems doing everything from managing ground transportation through to emergency dispatch. … I'm not sure it's even feasible to air gap all of that - the loss of productivity and additional cost would be far greater than the perceived security risks. Which of those systems would suffer from decreased productivity were they disconnected from the Internet? Indeed, I imagine that they'd experience increased productivity: there's no need for an air conditioning system to get its updates over the Internet rather than, say, by a human being with a thumb drive. Ditto monitors, ditto baggage handling, &c.
• paulmd 9y ago
  > My personal nightmare involves a vulnerability in a popular model of remotely connected and semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicle. The CAN bus is a fundamentally insecure system. Devices accept that you are the device ID you say you are. The only way for a device to vote you out is for it to see its forged ID go out on the bus and then trash the bus. Not remotely failsafe. Increasingly vehicles are networked systems. Devices need to act like it - encrypt data between themselves and authenticate each other. Without subsystem-level access controls (should the head unit be talking to the brake controller?) there is just too much attack surface. You can no longer be secure on a "friendly bus", this is now a mini-WAN as far as attack surface, and has been since wifi/bluetooth/cellular basebands were put on the bus. Firmware updates need to be cryptographically signed (or jailbreakable with a user-selectable root CA cert). Everything else is vehicle manufacturers whistling past the graveyard. The CAN bus is dead, it passed away probably 10 years ago, it's just zombie companies who refuse to re-engineer appropriately when they can just ignore the problem instead (recalls don't happen right?). It's cheaper just to put the new head unit in.
  • gaius 9y ago
    The CAN bus is a lol. So is the PCI bus inside your PC. It's not fair to sneer at something that doesn't do something it was never intended for.