8 ms·

Killing car privacy by federal mandate

91 points by necessity 9y ago

mnm1 9y ago
"What about the safety benefits of proposed technology?" Yes, what about the safety benefits of proposed technology? As in, what are they? Until that paragraph I didn't even know this was supposed to be a safety system, just a surveillance system. How is this supposed to increase safety? Also, who is going to pay for these boxes and what will be the penalty for not installing one? This makes spying by Google and FB look mild by comparison.
- zeta0134 9y ago
  It's my understanding that these broadcasts are supposed to aid other vehicles with their predictions in self-driving scenarios. I'm not necessarily against some sort of protocol for self driving cars to communicate with one another for this purpose, but the proposed solution seems to be severely lacking in basic security.
  - hoosieree 9y ago
    Car1: "my previous coordinates were xyz..." Car2: "hey I'm a botnet" Car3: "hey I'm a botnet" Car4: "hey I'm a botnet" ... Car9998: "hey I'm a botnet" Car9999: "did you say xyz? check out these hot singles near xyz"
- ScottBurson 9y ago
  > How is this supposed to increase safety? I guess the idea is to make it easier to build fully autonomous vehicles. I think it's pointless, though. It will take decades to equip the entire US auto fleet with these transmitters, and by that point, the vision and scene analysis problems that currently give autonomous vehicles trouble will have long since been solved anyway. ETA: the PDF linked from the article [0] supplies a rationale. But it also says that under the proposal, only new light vehicles would be required to have the transmitter. I think my argument stands: by the time even 50% of the cars have this, autonomous driving will be a solved problem. [0] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p...
  - tehlike 9y ago
    This reminds me of steve jobs - he drove his car without license plate :)
    - kylec 9y ago
      There are many cars in California that are driving around without license plates, some legally, and others through the lack of enforcement.
  - ambulancechaser 9y ago
    I think you've got your causation backwards; this is what will allow for widespread autonomous adoption. This proposal is making sure that all cars are speaking the same language and are talking to each other. I look at this as the Federal Government standardizing the width of rail roads so that we could get on with our business. But autonomous cars without intra-car communication seems hampered. As to the vision and scene analysis, the proposal specifically mentions that vision is limited by line of sight. This allows for cars to communicate around corners and through other cars. This seems like a net boon for all drivers that won't be rendered moot by a few cameras on cars.
    - ScottBurson 9y ago
      The median age of cars and light trucks in the US is around 9 years. That means it will take 9 years for this system to reach 50% penetration, once it becomes available at all, which is probably 3 years away at least. At the rate things are progressing, do you really think autonomy won't be a solved problem, or nearly so, in a dozen years? I can see the attraction of this system from a strictly engineering point of view -- it would be nice not to be limited by line of sight. But how many collisions between vehicles have you ever heard of where the drivers literally couldn't see each other until too late? I think these are pretty rare. Seems like occlusion is more of a problem when pedestrians or cyclists are involved, as they sometimes pop out unwisely from behind parked vehicles; but they're not going to be wearing transmitters. Also, radar provides some ability to see occluded vehicles; transmitters are not even the only solution to that problem. So, given the threat to privacy this system would represent, I don't see that the benefits approach the costs.
- ambulancechaser 9y ago
  You seem surprised, but this is an indicator that you're not reading a good article. They are covering something and don't even accurately describe the proposal by NHTSA. But thankfully they link to the proposal itself. So here's the summary: > This document proposes to establish a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS), No. 150, to mandate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications for new light vehicles and to standardize the message and format of V2V transmissions. This will create an information environment in which vehicle and device manufacturers can create and implement applications to improve safety, mobility, and the environment. Without a mandate to require and standardize V2V communications, the agency believes that manufacturers will not be able to move forward in an efficient way and that a critical mass of equipped vehicles would take many years to develop, if ever. Implementation of the new standard will enable vehicle manufacturers to develop safety applications that employ V2V communications as an input, two of which are estimated to prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes and prevent over one thousand fatalities annually. As to your questions, > what about the safety benefits of [the] proposed technology? ... How's this supposed to increase safety? From the executive summary, the benefit of this is that it provides more information without requiring line of sight to other vehicles. It can "see" through cars allowing it to perceive dangerous situations around corners and behind other cars. It provides more information like breaking force and path prediction so that more corrective action can be taken. If vehicles are updating each other with steering inputs and break inputs along with path prediction its hard to not envision how this could increase safety. A car can react to emergency breaking far far faster than a human can. From the linked proposal, there's a whole section VII Estimated costs and Benefits. Section D there is Estimated Benefits with subsections 1. Assumptions and Overview 2. Injury and Property Damage Benefits 3. Monetized Benefits 4. Non-Quantified Benefits. From the monitized annual benefits section, > Table VII–38 provides the undiscounted annual fatal equivalents, monetized benefits, and property damage and congestion savings of the proposed rule from the year 2021 to 2060. As shown, by Year 5 the proposed rule is estimated to save 129 to 169 fatal equivalents totaling approximately $1.3 to $1.6 billion annually. Approximately 12 percent of the monetized savings, $176 to $237 million, are from the estimated reduction of property damage and congestion. By the year 2060, with V2V fully deployed, the proposed rule is estimated to save approximately 5,631 to 7,613 fatal equivalents annually. Finally, the total associated monetized annual savings would range from $54.7 to $73.9 billion. Of these savings, $7.7 to $10.6 billion is estimated to be property damage and congestion savings. > Also, who is going to pay for these boxes Section VII (Estimated Costs and Benefits) B (Quantified Costs) 1. (Component Costs) has your answers! Physical hardware is estimated to add $245.79 for one radio and $347.18 for two radios with an estimated $17.80 installation fee. The added weight is expected to add $0.19 - $6.97 in fuel costs per year. Summarizing "The cost per new vehicle would range from $135 to $301...". As to the who, presumably the consumer. > What is the penalty for not installing one? From Section I (Executive Summary) the wording is that "to require all new light vehicles to be capable of Vehicle-to-Vehicle ("V2V") communications, such that they will send and receive Basic Safety Messages to and from other vehicles. This seems to be a regulation aimed at manufacturers, and non-compliance would probably come from marking the fleet of manufactured cars as not road legal.
- BurningFrog 9y ago
  The most basic safety feature is that cars can tell each other when they're braking, so your car can start braking the same millisecond, not when you happen no notice things.
  - CyberDildonics 9y ago
    Maybe the car should emit some sort of electro magnetic radiation signal that can be detected with a sensor. It could be emitted when breaking. It could even be part of the visible spectrum so we could see it as light. Some sort of breaking light or maybe just break light. Too bad no one thought of this earlier.
    - Neliquat 9y ago
      But then we would have to color code it, and have backup emitters to avoid false positives. About 2 or 3 would be enough.
  - jancsika 9y ago
    Are any of the TCP congestion control algorithms dependent on a router's TCP receiving messages that are trusted by the router to be originating from upstream routers based on an authentication scheme that the router manufacturers trust to deliver anti-DDOS safety features?
    - mixmastamyk 9y ago
      Much more likely to be UDP.
      - jancsika 9y ago
        Would you say that such a UDP-based scheme is safer than TCP?
        mixmastamyk 9y ago
        It's designed for such applications where timely delivery is more important than its confirmation and old data is useless. Safer? In the timeliness sense yes, in the delivery of important info yes, in the reliability of each packet no.
etimberg 9y ago
This reminds me of the complete lack of security in ADS-B transmissions from aircraft. See an interesting DefCon talk from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk
- kregasaurusrex 9y ago
  Not to mention the widespread availability of SDR chips in the RTL family which can hear this data transmitted if you're reasonably close to an airport.
  - ubernostrum 9y ago
    So far as I'm aware, ADS-B wasn't designed to be private. In fact, something of the opposite -- ADS-B was meant (in part) to provide notice of your presence to other aircraft in the vicinity.
    - comboy 9y ago
      I think he means lack of any authentication. Messages could be signed by the aircraft, by they aren't. You can buy hackrf below $200 and transmit them yourself. If you feel like breaking the law that is.
      - dom0 9y ago
        In Germany you can get up to ten years for doing that.
        comboy 9y ago
        I definitely do not advocate doing at. It's just that Mallory usually doesn't care about the law, so security should be based on something more.
        qb45 9y ago
microcolonel 9y ago
Woah, how did this even get on the table? It takes mere seconds to think of a vast array of genuine societal disasters that could come from this. This is beyond clipper chip levels of stupid.
djyaz1200 9y ago
Big Auto Exec... "Hey we are years behind on self driving tech, what are we going to do about it? How can we catch up? We're going to end up having to license software from Tesla/Google?!" Other Big Auto Exec... "Oh don't worry we'll just use our political influence to change the rules to dramatically simplify the problem."
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  Self-driving car engineer: "detecting cars you can't directly see is a huge problem, what are we going to do about this??" Other Engineer: "just have the other car tell us. I know you like solving hard general case problems, but come on. This solution is super obvious."
  - djyaz1200 9y ago
    Problem... this broadcast approach isn't particularly helpful unless all cars have it. So to add this TCAS style solution to all cars might cost what? $100/car in equipment alone? For all 263 million cars in the US that would be $26 billion. Seems pricy when Tesla has a system today that solves this problem without all that infrastructure, or the privacy concerns?
    - ambulancechaser 9y ago
      the broadcast system is certainly helpful if less than all cars have it. The proposal estimates the cost per car at 100-300 dollars. > Seems pricy when Tesla has a system today that solves this problem without all that infrastructure, or the privacy concerns? Solves it for those cars, and certainly at an expense higher than 100-300 cars. And it will only get better as it gets information from other cars.
- csours 9y ago
  Why do you think this is a new thing? It's been planned since at least 1999. Also, on the subject of Tesla/Google, you do know they already do collect the same information the article describes, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything
CalChris 9y ago
The proposed message format isn't including car identity, at least that I can tell. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p... Without identity, how is this a massive invasion of privacy on the order of Google and Facebook?
- revelation 9y ago
  It is, messages are signed by a certificate rotated every 5 minutes. So for 5 minutes you know precisely which car it is and then when the changeover happens you just look for which certificate has disappeared and which has newly appeared and do some fuzzy matching based on position and heading. That is not remotely anonymous.
  - Godel_unicode 9y ago
    So anyone who can already follow a car can continue to follow a car. You're aware that cars have a globally unique identifier painted on the outside already, yes? And that identifier never changes and is trivially tied to the owners identity? Let's try to maintain some perspective.
    - andmarios 9y ago
      The VIN isn't transmitted wirelessly though. The article mentions that it is possible to build antennas that can extend the reception range by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, so 300m (the proposed design range) may be stalked from as far away as 30km (2 orders of magnitude) or even more. Place strategically a few of these antennas and you can monitor a huge area.
      - Godel_unicode 9y ago
        License plate + state = GUID.
        bendbro 9y ago
revelation 9y ago
None of them, however, permits tracking quite as cheaply, undetectably, and pervasively This is a theme. Large swathes of privacy have been eroded simply because technology allowed the Government to use principally legal methods on a much greater and automated scale. And with the past an current government, there is no particular push to reverse this. The only help here has been the Supreme Court decision on warrantless GPS trackers.
kylec 9y ago
Not only are there privacy implications in terms of what the vehicles will be transmitting locally, vehicles also need to have a network connection as well to receive new certificates and certificate revocations: Under the proposal, each message will be digitally signed. Each car will be provisioned with 20 certificates (and corresponding secret keys) per week, and will cycle through these certificates during the week, using each one for five minutes at a time. Certificates will be revocable; revocation is meant to guard against incorrect (malicious or erroneous) information in the broadcast messages, though there is no concrete proposal for how to detect such incorrect information. This regulation will force all cars to be connected cars, and being connected comes with its own security and privacy implications.
zkms 9y ago
Given how shoddy (http://illmatics.com/Remote%20Car%20Hacking.pdf http://illmatics.com/Remote%20Car%20Hacking.pdf) automobile software is, the idea of safety-critical components parsing radio broadcasts from other vehicles and acting upon that is very worrisome. I do not trust vehicle software manufacturers to get this anywhere near right.
hajile 9y ago
I'm betting that will cut down on speeders since automated ticketing will be as easy as a receiver that matches the certificate with the car and automatically issues a ticket.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  Also it will enable passive average speed enforcement. "You were in LA and Vegas, and exceeded the minimum time to legally travel there".
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    It's a tool that will be used to raise revenue (tax $/mile/minute) and drive people away from personally owned vehicles to a more expensive robot Uber future.
  - ambulancechaser 9y ago
    The ID is a randomly generated 4 byte integer. This is obviously not identifying for law enforcement. I don't know about the certificates if they could be identifying but I'm not seeing a way to track down an owner or operator from this otherwise.
- pmiller2 9y ago
  Except the driver of the car is liable for the ticket, not the car or its owner.
- megablast 9y ago
  Which is a huge safety benefit.
Spooky23 9y ago
Car privacy has been dead for a decade or more between cashless toll systems, cellular carriers and LPR. It's not coming back. Sticking your head in the sand and pushing back against a system that is necessary to protect the safety of the driving public as automated vehicles become a thing is shortsighted. Image recognition technology is such that you likely have a dozen or more government and private entities noticing you. You can buy data from cell carriers to know the average income of travelers on a road at a given time for 45 minute drive in urban and suburban areas. Hell, I built a parking gate system for somebody with a raspberry pi and an outdoor security camera sourced from EBay -- and I'm a dope with no unique skill in these areas.
- biafra 9y ago
  This is different. It is full surveillance everywhere, for every car and everytime. Not just some roads with cameras. Whose pictures (at least in Germany) are supposed not to be saved except for trucks.
  - Spooky23 9y ago
    It's there now. In the US, I'm sure the FBI and DEA have realtime feeds of phone movements for thousands or millions of phones. They had pervasive LPR surveillance a decade ago.
    - ams6110 9y ago
      Perhaps. But you can put your phone on airplane mode or turn it off or just leave it at home if you don't want it to be tracked.
      - mschuster91 9y ago
        You really believe a phone is truly switched off? Unless the main processor kills the baseband power by GPIO, it is not - and baseband processors are a fairly easy exploit target, much more so for a state-level threat.
SkyMarshal 9y ago
My thoughts: >The basic summary of the proposal, known as Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), is as follows. From the moment a car turns on and every tenth of a second until it shuts off, it will broadcast a so-called “basic safety message” (BSM) to within a minimum distance of 300m. The message will include position (with accuracy of 1.5m), speed, heading, acceleration, yaw rate, path history for the past 300m, predicted path curvature, steering wheel angle, car length and width rounded to 20cm precision, and a few other indicators. Each message will also include a temporary vehicle id (randomly generated and changed every five minutes), to enable receivers to tell whether they are hearing from the same car or from different cars. Ok this could be useful, especially with autonomous vehicles hitting the road. >Under the proposal, each message will be digitally signed. Each car will be provisioned with 20 certificates (and corresponding secret keys) per week, and will cycle through these certificates during the week, using each one for five minutes at a time. Certificates will be revocable; revocation is meant to guard against incorrect (malicious or erroneous) information in the broadcast messages, though there is no concrete proposal for how to detect such incorrect information. Ugh, why do they need to be provisioned by a third party. Just let each car generate its own random ephemeral keypairs per some time interval and sign with those. You already said "Each message will also include a temporary vehicle id (randomly generated and changed every five minutes)", so what's the need for third party certificate provisioning.
- forgottenpass 9y ago
  Ugh, why do they need to be provisioned by a third party. So the authorities know where to send the speeding tickets.
  - SkyMarshal 9y ago
    Traffic cameras, radar guns, and license plates already work pretty well for that.
    - forgottenpass 9y ago
      They do work, but what if they could be cheaper and more effective? A radio receiver is a cheap interface to implement and doesn't have the same line of sight requirements. Such a system would offer a bigger speed trap monitoring range, easier installation, and much more location flexibility. Put one in every police vehicle. Get on a few interstate-adjacent radio towers. Roadside battery-powered installations that can easily be moved on a regular basis. I wasn't trying to make a moral claim about the good/badness of speed traps. Just that a broadcast vehicle position system that allows the state to easily identify the vehicle will eventually be used for enforcing traffic law.

91 points by necessity 9y ago

mnm1 9y ago

"What about the safety benefits of proposed technology?" Yes, what about the safety benefits of proposed technology? As in, what are they? Until that paragraph I didn't even know this was supposed to be a safety system, just a surveillance system. How is this supposed to increase safety? Also, who is going to pay for these boxes and what will be the penalty for not installing one? This makes spying by Google and FB look mild by comparison.

zeta0134 9y ago
It's my understanding that these broadcasts are supposed to aid other vehicles with their predictions in self-driving scenarios. I'm not necessarily against some sort of protocol for self driving cars to communicate with one another for this purpose, but the proposed solution seems to be severely lacking in basic security.
- hoosieree 9y ago
  Car1: "my previous coordinates were xyz..." Car2: "hey I'm a botnet" Car3: "hey I'm a botnet" Car4: "hey I'm a botnet" ... Car9998: "hey I'm a botnet" Car9999: "did you say xyz? check out these hot singles near xyz"
ScottBurson 9y ago
> How is this supposed to increase safety? I guess the idea is to make it easier to build fully autonomous vehicles. I think it's pointless, though. It will take decades to equip the entire US auto fleet with these transmitters, and by that point, the vision and scene analysis problems that currently give autonomous vehicles trouble will have long since been solved anyway. ETA: the PDF linked from the article [0] supplies a rationale. But it also says that under the proposal, only new light vehicles would be required to have the transmitter. I think my argument stands: by the time even 50% of the cars have this, autonomous driving will be a solved problem. [0] https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p...
- tehlike 9y ago
  This reminds me of steve jobs - he drove his car without license plate :)
  - kylec 9y ago
    There are many cars in California that are driving around without license plates, some legally, and others through the lack of enforcement.
- ambulancechaser 9y ago
  I think you've got your causation backwards; this is what will allow for widespread autonomous adoption. This proposal is making sure that all cars are speaking the same language and are talking to each other. I look at this as the Federal Government standardizing the width of rail roads so that we could get on with our business. But autonomous cars without intra-car communication seems hampered. As to the vision and scene analysis, the proposal specifically mentions that vision is limited by line of sight. This allows for cars to communicate around corners and through other cars. This seems like a net boon for all drivers that won't be rendered moot by a few cameras on cars.
  - ScottBurson 9y ago
    The median age of cars and light trucks in the US is around 9 years. That means it will take 9 years for this system to reach 50% penetration, once it becomes available at all, which is probably 3 years away at least. At the rate things are progressing, do you really think autonomy won't be a solved problem, or nearly so, in a dozen years? I can see the attraction of this system from a strictly engineering point of view -- it would be nice not to be limited by line of sight. But how many collisions between vehicles have you ever heard of where the drivers literally couldn't see each other until too late? I think these are pretty rare. Seems like occlusion is more of a problem when pedestrians or cyclists are involved, as they sometimes pop out unwisely from behind parked vehicles; but they're not going to be wearing transmitters. Also, radar provides some ability to see occluded vehicles; transmitters are not even the only solution to that problem. So, given the threat to privacy this system would represent, I don't see that the benefits approach the costs.
ambulancechaser 9y ago
You seem surprised, but this is an indicator that you're not reading a good article. They are covering something and don't even accurately describe the proposal by NHTSA. But thankfully they link to the proposal itself. So here's the summary: > This document proposes to establish a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standard (FMVSS), No. 150, to mandate vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communications for new light vehicles and to standardize the message and format of V2V transmissions. This will create an information environment in which vehicle and device manufacturers can create and implement applications to improve safety, mobility, and the environment. Without a mandate to require and standardize V2V communications, the agency believes that manufacturers will not be able to move forward in an efficient way and that a critical mass of equipped vehicles would take many years to develop, if ever. Implementation of the new standard will enable vehicle manufacturers to develop safety applications that employ V2V communications as an input, two of which are estimated to prevent hundreds of thousands of crashes and prevent over one thousand fatalities annually. As to your questions, > what about the safety benefits of [the] proposed technology? ... How's this supposed to increase safety? From the executive summary, the benefit of this is that it provides more information without requiring line of sight to other vehicles. It can "see" through cars allowing it to perceive dangerous situations around corners and behind other cars. It provides more information like breaking force and path prediction so that more corrective action can be taken. If vehicles are updating each other with steering inputs and break inputs along with path prediction its hard to not envision how this could increase safety. A car can react to emergency breaking far far faster than a human can. From the linked proposal, there's a whole section VII Estimated costs and Benefits. Section D there is Estimated Benefits with subsections 1. Assumptions and Overview 2. Injury and Property Damage Benefits 3. Monetized Benefits 4. Non-Quantified Benefits. From the monitized annual benefits section, > Table VII–38 provides the undiscounted annual fatal equivalents, monetized benefits, and property damage and congestion savings of the proposed rule from the year 2021 to 2060. As shown, by Year 5 the proposed rule is estimated to save 129 to 169 fatal equivalents totaling approximately $1.3 to $1.6 billion annually. Approximately 12 percent of the monetized savings, $176 to $237 million, are from the estimated reduction of property damage and congestion. By the year 2060, with V2V fully deployed, the proposed rule is estimated to save approximately 5,631 to 7,613 fatal equivalents annually. Finally, the total associated monetized annual savings would range from $54.7 to $73.9 billion. Of these savings, $7.7 to $10.6 billion is estimated to be property damage and congestion savings. > Also, who is going to pay for these boxes Section VII (Estimated Costs and Benefits) B (Quantified Costs) 1. (Component Costs) has your answers! Physical hardware is estimated to add $245.79 for one radio and $347.18 for two radios with an estimated $17.80 installation fee. The added weight is expected to add $0.19 - $6.97 in fuel costs per year. Summarizing "The cost per new vehicle would range from $135 to $301...". As to the who, presumably the consumer. > What is the penalty for not installing one? From Section I (Executive Summary) the wording is that "to require all new light vehicles to be capable of Vehicle-to-Vehicle ("V2V") communications, such that they will send and receive Basic Safety Messages to and from other vehicles. This seems to be a regulation aimed at manufacturers, and non-compliance would probably come from marking the fleet of manufactured cars as not road legal.
BurningFrog 9y ago
The most basic safety feature is that cars can tell each other when they're braking, so your car can start braking the same millisecond, not when you happen no notice things.
- CyberDildonics 9y ago
  Maybe the car should emit some sort of electro magnetic radiation signal that can be detected with a sensor. It could be emitted when breaking. It could even be part of the visible spectrum so we could see it as light. Some sort of breaking light or maybe just break light. Too bad no one thought of this earlier.
  - Neliquat 9y ago
    But then we would have to color code it, and have backup emitters to avoid false positives. About 2 or 3 would be enough.
- jancsika 9y ago
  Are any of the TCP congestion control algorithms dependent on a router's TCP receiving messages that are trusted by the router to be originating from upstream routers based on an authentication scheme that the router manufacturers trust to deliver anti-DDOS safety features?
  - mixmastamyk 9y ago
    Much more likely to be UDP.
    - jancsika 9y ago
      Would you say that such a UDP-based scheme is safer than TCP?
      - mixmastamyk 9y ago
        It's designed for such applications where timely delivery is more important than its confirmation and old data is useless. Safer? In the timeliness sense yes, in the delivery of important info yes, in the reliability of each packet no.

etimberg 9y ago

This reminds me of the complete lack of security in ADS-B transmissions from aircraft. See an interesting DefCon talk from a few years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CXv1j3GbgLk

kregasaurusrex 9y ago
Not to mention the widespread availability of SDR chips in the RTL family which can hear this data transmitted if you're reasonably close to an airport.
- ubernostrum 9y ago
  So far as I'm aware, ADS-B wasn't designed to be private. In fact, something of the opposite -- ADS-B was meant (in part) to provide notice of your presence to other aircraft in the vicinity.
  - comboy 9y ago
    I think he means lack of any authentication. Messages could be signed by the aircraft, by they aren't. You can buy hackrf below $200 and transmit them yourself. If you feel like breaking the law that is.
    - dom0 9y ago
      In Germany you can get up to ten years for doing that.
      - comboy 9y ago
        I definitely do not advocate doing at. It's just that Mallory usually doesn't care about the law, so security should be based on something more.
        qb45 9y ago

microcolonel 9y ago

Woah, how did this even get on the table? It takes mere seconds to think of a vast array of genuine societal disasters that could come from this. This is beyond clipper chip levels of stupid.

djyaz1200 9y ago

Big Auto Exec... "Hey we are years behind on self driving tech, what are we going to do about it? How can we catch up? We're going to end up having to license software from Tesla/Google?!" Other Big Auto Exec... "Oh don't worry we'll just use our political influence to change the rules to dramatically simplify the problem."

Godel_unicode 9y ago
Self-driving car engineer: "detecting cars you can't directly see is a huge problem, what are we going to do about this??" Other Engineer: "just have the other car tell us. I know you like solving hard general case problems, but come on. This solution is super obvious."
- djyaz1200 9y ago
  Problem... this broadcast approach isn't particularly helpful unless all cars have it. So to add this TCAS style solution to all cars might cost what? $100/car in equipment alone? For all 263 million cars in the US that would be $26 billion. Seems pricy when Tesla has a system today that solves this problem without all that infrastructure, or the privacy concerns?
  - ambulancechaser 9y ago
    the broadcast system is certainly helpful if less than all cars have it. The proposal estimates the cost per car at 100-300 dollars. > Seems pricy when Tesla has a system today that solves this problem without all that infrastructure, or the privacy concerns? Solves it for those cars, and certainly at an expense higher than 100-300 cars. And it will only get better as it gets information from other cars.
csours 9y ago
Why do you think this is a new thing? It's been planned since at least 1999. Also, on the subject of Tesla/Google, you do know they already do collect the same information the article describes, right? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vehicle-to-everything

CalChris 9y ago

The proposed message format isn't including car identity, at least that I can tell. https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.pdf https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2017-01-12/pdf/2016-31059.p... Without identity, how is this a massive invasion of privacy on the order of Google and Facebook?

revelation 9y ago
It is, messages are signed by a certificate rotated every 5 minutes. So for 5 minutes you know precisely which car it is and then when the changeover happens you just look for which certificate has disappeared and which has newly appeared and do some fuzzy matching based on position and heading. That is not remotely anonymous.
- Godel_unicode 9y ago
  So anyone who can already follow a car can continue to follow a car. You're aware that cars have a globally unique identifier painted on the outside already, yes? And that identifier never changes and is trivially tied to the owners identity? Let's try to maintain some perspective.
  - andmarios 9y ago
    The VIN isn't transmitted wirelessly though. The article mentions that it is possible to build antennas that can extend the reception range by 2 to 3 orders of magnitude, so 300m (the proposed design range) may be stalked from as far away as 30km (2 orders of magnitude) or even more. Place strategically a few of these antennas and you can monitor a huge area.
    - Godel_unicode 9y ago
      License plate + state = GUID.
      - bendbro 9y ago

revelation 9y ago

None of them, however, permits tracking quite as cheaply, undetectably, and pervasively This is a theme. Large swathes of privacy have been eroded simply because technology allowed the Government to use principally legal methods on a much greater and automated scale. And with the past an current government, there is no particular push to reverse this. The only help here has been the Supreme Court decision on warrantless GPS trackers.

kylec 9y ago

Not only are there privacy implications in terms of what the vehicles will be transmitting locally, vehicles also need to have a network connection as well to receive new certificates and certificate revocations: Under the proposal, each message will be digitally signed. Each car will be provisioned with 20 certificates (and corresponding secret keys) per week, and will cycle through these certificates during the week, using each one for five minutes at a time. Certificates will be revocable; revocation is meant to guard against incorrect (malicious or erroneous) information in the broadcast messages, though there is no concrete proposal for how to detect such incorrect information. This regulation will force all cars to be connected cars, and being connected comes with its own security and privacy implications.

zkms 9y ago

Given how shoddy (http://illmatics.com/Remote%20Car%20Hacking.pdf http://illmatics.com/Remote%20Car%20Hacking.pdf) automobile software is, the idea of safety-critical components parsing radio broadcasts from other vehicles and acting upon that is very worrisome. I do not trust vehicle software manufacturers to get this anywhere near right.

hajile 9y ago

I'm betting that will cut down on speeders since automated ticketing will be as easy as a receiver that matches the certificate with the car and automatically issues a ticket.

Godel_unicode 9y ago
Also it will enable passive average speed enforcement. "You were in LA and Vegas, and exceeded the minimum time to legally travel there".
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It's a tool that will be used to raise revenue (tax $/mile/minute) and drive people away from personally owned vehicles to a more expensive robot Uber future.
- ambulancechaser 9y ago
  The ID is a randomly generated 4 byte integer. This is obviously not identifying for law enforcement. I don't know about the certificates if they could be identifying but I'm not seeing a way to track down an owner or operator from this otherwise.
pmiller2 9y ago
Except the driver of the car is liable for the ticket, not the car or its owner.
megablast 9y ago
Which is a huge safety benefit.

Spooky23 9y ago

Car privacy has been dead for a decade or more between cashless toll systems, cellular carriers and LPR. It's not coming back. Sticking your head in the sand and pushing back against a system that is necessary to protect the safety of the driving public as automated vehicles become a thing is shortsighted. Image recognition technology is such that you likely have a dozen or more government and private entities noticing you. You can buy data from cell carriers to know the average income of travelers on a road at a given time for 45 minute drive in urban and suburban areas. Hell, I built a parking gate system for somebody with a raspberry pi and an outdoor security camera sourced from EBay -- and I'm a dope with no unique skill in these areas.

biafra 9y ago
This is different. It is full surveillance everywhere, for every car and everytime. Not just some roads with cameras. Whose pictures (at least in Germany) are supposed not to be saved except for trucks.
- Spooky23 9y ago
  It's there now. In the US, I'm sure the FBI and DEA have realtime feeds of phone movements for thousands or millions of phones. They had pervasive LPR surveillance a decade ago.
  - ams6110 9y ago
    Perhaps. But you can put your phone on airplane mode or turn it off or just leave it at home if you don't want it to be tracked.
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      You really believe a phone is truly switched off? Unless the main processor kills the baseband power by GPIO, it is not - and baseband processors are a fairly easy exploit target, much more so for a state-level threat.

SkyMarshal 9y ago

My thoughts: >The basic summary of the proposal, known as Dedicated Short Range Communication (DSRC), is as follows. From the moment a car turns on and every tenth of a second until it shuts off, it will broadcast a so-called “basic safety message” (BSM) to within a minimum distance of 300m. The message will include position (with accuracy of 1.5m), speed, heading, acceleration, yaw rate, path history for the past 300m, predicted path curvature, steering wheel angle, car length and width rounded to 20cm precision, and a few other indicators. Each message will also include a temporary vehicle id (randomly generated and changed every five minutes), to enable receivers to tell whether they are hearing from the same car or from different cars. Ok this could be useful, especially with autonomous vehicles hitting the road. >Under the proposal, each message will be digitally signed. Each car will be provisioned with 20 certificates (and corresponding secret keys) per week, and will cycle through these certificates during the week, using each one for five minutes at a time. Certificates will be revocable; revocation is meant to guard against incorrect (malicious or erroneous) information in the broadcast messages, though there is no concrete proposal for how to detect such incorrect information. Ugh, why do they need to be provisioned by a third party. Just let each car generate its own random ephemeral keypairs per some time interval and sign with those. You already said "Each message will also include a temporary vehicle id (randomly generated and changed every five minutes)", so what's the need for third party certificate provisioning.

forgottenpass 9y ago
Ugh, why do they need to be provisioned by a third party. So the authorities know where to send the speeding tickets.
- SkyMarshal 9y ago
  Traffic cameras, radar guns, and license plates already work pretty well for that.
  - forgottenpass 9y ago
    They do work, but what if they could be cheaper and more effective? A radio receiver is a cheap interface to implement and doesn't have the same line of sight requirements. Such a system would offer a bigger speed trap monitoring range, easier installation, and much more location flexibility. Put one in every police vehicle. Get on a few interstate-adjacent radio towers. Roadside battery-powered installations that can easily be moved on a regular basis. I wasn't trying to make a moral claim about the good/badness of speed traps. Just that a broadcast vehicle position system that allows the state to easily identify the vehicle will eventually be used for enforcing traffic law.