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Because business people are not engineers. Telling a business person they have a software problem is meaningless. Showing them losing a LOT of money because th

• onion2k 6y ago
  Nobody thinks about the fact that they are "fly by wire", using software to control everything. Who thinks about changing the battery controller to cause a battery fire? Or controlling the acceleration to maximum? Or setting off the airbags? Or... Automotive engineers think about those things. When we drive our cars we're trusting them to have thought about those things, just as we're trusting that the engineer who designed the wheel nuts did his work well enough to stop the wheels coming off, or the engineer who designed the steering linkage considered how we might need to go round corners reliably.
  • deleted 6y ago
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  • MaxBarraclough 6y ago
    > Automotive engineers think about those things Not always. Hacking a vehicle's brakes is no longer the stuff of sci-fi, it's already happened in a poorly-designed Internet-enabled jeep, see [0]. (As an aside, I have no idea why they thought it was acceptable to do their proof-of-concept demonstration while driving at speed on public roads.) [0] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-highway/ https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
    • macintux 6y ago
      That story made me angry. There’s no way they could have known precisely what would happen when they executed that hack; software has bugs (the whole point of these exercises) and complex interactions between systems cause all sorts of weird behavior.
      • leetcrew 6y ago
        setting aside unforeseen interactions between complex systems, the article seems to say that they deliberately disabled the brakes on a public road, while the jeep was moving! that goes well past a fun prank for a story. irresponsible on the journalist's part too to consent to this. the point could have been made just as well on a private track.
    • userbinator 6y ago
      (As an aside, I have no idea why they thought it was acceptable to do their proof-of-concept demonstration while driving at speed on public roads.) To cause even more outrage.
  • Silhouette 6y ago
    Automotive engineers think about those things. If that were a reliable safeguard, we wouldn't already have several examples about the behaviour of connected vehicles being compromised remotely in one way or another. Since unfortunately we do have such examples, evidently whatever is going on within the engineering groups at the auto manufacturers is not sufficient to ensure our safety and security in relation to these new generations of connected vehicles.
  • yodelshady 6y ago
    Do they? Ask literally any ICS security professional their main concern, it's "[organisation(s)] think a system is airgapped when it isn't". Whether a system is software-defined/hardware-defined, networked/standalone - these are not technically hard questions to answer, correctly. (No more so than, say, whether polymer O-rings will completely fail to do their job when cold.) That they're not answered correctly indicates a big communication issue, and whilst I'm sure management has much to answer for, I'm not sure engineers escape the blame for that either.
  • ensiferum 6y ago
    That's the reason why there are standards such as the ISO2626, so when a vehicle malfunctions and causes mayhem the vendor isn't at fault but the standard (assuming that the vendor did meet the standard). And then the blame can be pointed at the standard (i.e. "we did everything by the book not our fault") then nobody is liable.
  • goatinaboat 6y ago
    Automotive engineers think about those things. Looking at CANBUS, I guarantee that they do not. Any device trusts any other device, access to the bus is the only security control. Connect your entertainment system - probably an unpatched Android tablet - so it can display any info from the rest of the car, instant compromise of everything.
• DoingIsLearning 6y ago
  > It really should be illegal to have network connected cars. Any software security engineer knows that. Everybody loves network connected new cars. Nobody thinks about the fact that they are "fly by wire" I fully agree that automotive and medical equipment/IT could greatly benefit from not having security as an afterthought. However, I don't know any vehicle with connectivity (other than that Jeep Cherokee controversy), which does not have safety critical CAN/FlexRay buses segregated from user facing 'infotainment' systems. What that means is that the network bus in which your 'compromised' infotainment system is able to operate is completely separate from Engine, ABS, AEB, ESP, Airbags etc. The solutions vary but there is usually a physical gateway that prevents a passthrough MITM attacks, so for example you cannot simple send a message frame from your infotainment pretending to be an Emergency braking request to your ABS system.
  • Silhouette 6y ago
    The problem is that there is an increasing overlap between physical vehicle control systems, cabin controls and displays, and remote communications. For example, how do you design a system that can automatically call for help in the event of an accident without giving that system access to the sensors that also trigger airbag deployment and similar safety features? How do you build "self-driving" automation (or even less ambitious driver aids that are already in widespread use) without relying on sensors observing the environment around the vehicle, which may be subject to interference or deliberate deception?
    • DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      All the use cases you described are already implemented in today's cars, bus segregation doesn't mean zero communication. Gateways can allow for certain messages to pass-through, the point is that they preserve the garantee that certain safety-critical messages can only originate from within a specific network. It's basically a crude MITM mitigation.
      • TeMPOraL 6y ago
        > All the use cases you described are already implemented in today's cars, bus segregation doesn't mean zero communication. That's the problem, though. Once bidirectional communication exists, you can pretty much guarantee there's an exploitable hole in it that can be used to break the firewall.
• MaxBarraclough 6y ago
  > It really should be illegal to have network connected cars. The important systems should not be permitted to be connected to the Internet. If an Internet-enabled entertainment system is fully isolated from the systems that really matter, there's no problem.
  • lvturner 6y ago
    Even then you could create random full volume sharp noise to be emitted from said entertainment system (or perhaps a blood curdling scream) I could see that causing some secondary serious problems. Could potentially amplify its impact by combining it with the GPS to ensure it occurs at a high speed and in busy traffic too.
    • DoingIsLearning 6y ago
      And that is why fail-safe is important. Most older infotainment systems have a physical power switch which is a hard interrupt to power-off. It is in my view a design mistake to have full touch-screen interfaces on infotainment.
      • hutzlibu 6y ago
        Most older system of any kind had a physical power switch. And I still want that. To be sure, that when I turn off a device, it is really off.
      • sriram_malhar 6y ago
        It could just be a soft commanding voice that says, "this is not an emergency. Please pull over to one side of the road and get out of the car and wait". Just that will cause enough chaos and accidents.
        • Teever 6y ago
          There is an insane bug in many human minds that is easily exploited with a soft commanding voice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_phone_call_scam https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strip_search_phone_call_scam
• im3w1l 6y ago
  Yes exactly, people instinctively deny to themselves inconvenient things if they can find even a flimsy out. So sometimes you need a spectacular demonstration to pierce the psychological defenses.
• hobby-coder-guy 6y ago
  > Telling a business person they have a software problem is meaningless. Why do you think this? It isn’t true.
• _the_inflator 6y ago
  > What could go wrong in a 2 ton computer on wheels I don't see it this way. Right now, there are so many people in cars that should not drive. Alcohol, drugs, lacking skills - to me, computers add to safety. There will always be a risk. I trust computers more in this case.
  • verroq 6y ago
    The point is that automation causes us to cede control to the machines which can be hacked, or worse abused. It is a transfer of power to whoever controls the machines. This centralising power can be abused in ways people can only imagine. Of course, people will give up what’s left of their control and power in the name of “safety and security”, they’ve been doing that since 9/11. So much so that we have the term post-9/11 to remind them to toe the line (and to kneel and take off their shoes). Imagine for instance there is a bush fire and your centrally controlled car decides that the fire is fake news and prevents you from leaving since it’ll cause congestion on the roads. No different from Twitter banning the NY post story. Maybe they decide NY Post headquarters is not a real place and refuse to navigate the car there. Yeah we should implement some kind of social credit system so that people who do drugs can’t drive or take public transport. They’ve got that in the modern utopia of China right now.
  • marcosdumay 6y ago
    Easily hacked computers don't add safety anywhere. They only add random failure and the possibility of large scale disasters. If you want to push the safety related tasks into the computer, you have the obligation to make them hard to hack. And on the case of cars, that includes not plugging them into the internet.
    • Silhouette 6y ago
      They only add random failure and the possibility of large scale disasters. And the latter is the really big danger with autonomous vehicles. The same consistency that means they aren't vulnerable to as much random variation as a human driver could also become a weakness. Yes, a drunk or some idiot on their phone or an unwitting patsy whose drink was spiked at the bar can cause a fatal crash. But they can't simultaneously cause 500,000 fatal crashes by doing the exact same stupid thing 500,000 times at once or by being the victim of the exact same crime 500,000 times at once.