10 ms·

Why do you require software to be more resilient than other things? If I pour water in the gastank of my car, it will also fail to drive. Or gas in the sprinkl

• jl6 6y ago
  “Using it wrong” is usually quite obvious with real-life machinery. Software has many more ways of using it wrong that are very unobvious, that the user has no reason to suspect could be dangerous, and that have never been seen before.
• iforgotpassword 6y ago
  Holding down the button for your hazard lights should not break your car. Holding down a key should not crash an app.
  • mcosta 6y ago
    Holding down a pedal probably is going to crash your car.
    • ultinick 6y ago
      Only 1 in 3 chance
      • jfk13 6y ago
        I see you don't drive an automatic.
    • CRConrad 6y ago
      I think I can sit in my car with a foot on the brake pedal all day long and it won't break the car. Your proposed problem will probably only affect bad spellers, who have a break pedal.
• 3pt14159 6y ago
  Because often times crashes in an app lead to information exfiltration or remote code execution.
• mikeyjk 6y ago
  Security implications, I would imagine.
• martijnvds 6y ago
  Pumps for different types of fuel have differently shaped nozzles here, making it very hard/impossible to fill up with the wrong kind. Of course if you're trying to break it, everything is possible.
  • lvturner 6y ago
    Well.. it depends on the shape https://www.autonews.com/article/20130521/RETAIL05/130529968/vw-to-modify-late-model-diesels-to-prevent-improper-fueling https://www.autonews.com/article/20130521/RETAIL05/130529968...
  • bregma 6y ago
    Sugar is a fuel and it just slides right in to the tank. Try it.
  • gvb 6y ago
    I don't know where your "here" is, but here in the USA, you cannot put diesel in a vehicle's gas tank, but you can put gas in a vehicle's diesel tank. Putting gas in a diesel vehicle is very bad. Reason: The gas nozzles dispensing unleaded gas were made smaller to prevent people from putting leaded gas into a vehicle that required unleaded gas (which would poison the catalytic converter). The diesel nozzles remained unchanged and leaded gas (with the big nozzles) went away.
    • imoverclocked 6y ago
      Consumer diesel vehicles often have a mechanism to (try to) prevent the insertion of a gas nozzle. Source: I had one of those “evil” Jetta’s
    • toast0 6y ago
      As imoverclocked mentioned, some vehicles (VWs mostly AFAIK) have contraptions in the filler tube to attempt to prevent filling with unleaded gas. Of course, they don't quite work (at least the retrofit ones don't), which I know because some of the diesel pumps have the unleaded size nozzle, and I've filled with those, it just takes a lot longer.
• masklinn 6y ago
  > Why do you require software to be more resilient than other things? Because software by virtue of not requiring physical access is much easier for bad actors to mess with. Abuse of such also seems to be classified very differently than abuse of physical systems by human brains e.g. almost no rando would think of putting sugar in your gas tank while walking near your car, but nobody blinks at fucking with your input fields.
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• Mountain_Skies 6y ago
  The answer to this should vary by the functionality of the software. If I have a program that calculates projected weight loss and it's only used by me on my computer, crashing or displaying obviously incorrect values from accepting negative values for weight or body fat percentage only impacts me so it's mostly a user friendliness issue. If I'm entering my billable time into my employers time tracking system, anything that could corrupt data impacts more than just me. While I could intentionally lie about my billable hours without detection, I shouldn't be able to accidentally or intentionally enter that I worked -5 hours or 5000 hours on a particular day. Accepting either is undesirable and impacts others. I'm confused why the parent comment is being downvoted. It's a valid question. It might sound naïve to some but it's still worth discussing.
• tener 6y ago
  We require software to be resilient because it is used as a building blocks for large (sometimes exteremely so) systems. The deeper in the stack something is, the more costly the failure. A human may not input any of those strings. Another software (which does not reason in any way about the data it is processing, unlike the human) may do whatever.
• huffmsa 6y ago
  There are also warning labels all over the various fill caps on a vehicle. "Unleaded gasoline only". Which are like real-world input validation. It's just not feasible to check the fluid before allowing it in. But is is feasible to add a data validation layer to your application.
• bregma 6y ago
  Because it's just software. You can just change it and it costs nothing. Redesigning the powertrain in your car to be resilient when non-gasoline is introduced into the combustion chamber is expensive. Redesigning software is just changing some code; you just need to say something like 'Zoom. Enhance.' or 'It's a Unix system! I know this!' and it will take care of itself after a dozen rapid random keystrokes.
• taneq 6y ago
  Because software has hundreds or thousands of tanks, compartments, cogs, levers, buttons and switches. And if it's not designed robustly, using any one of those things slightly wrong (or even right, but there's a bug in the software) can make the entire thing disappear in a cloud of smoke, taking your groceries with it.
  • yitchelle 6y ago
    The funny thing about this comment is that it is also applicable to the software in the car. The amount of software in today's car is mind boggling, and it grow exponentially as more and more features make it to the public roads.
    • taneq 6y ago
      Absolutely! And we're even less tolerant of software errors (even ones without safety implications) in vehicles (and other appliances) than on computers.
• pjc50 6y ago
  If I pour water in my gastank and it gives me the private social media posts of a million people, that might be a problem for more than just me.
• rakoo 6y ago
  If you look at the bugs in the article, they're not that foolish. They're basically perfectly valid things to be able to do: entering text in a text field, or pressing buttons to do things. There is a specific set of valid input for your gas tank, but anything that is text should be accepted for text input. The analogy would be something like that: - if I throw spaghetti on my windshield, my car shouldn't break down - if I hold the wiper's stick to the position that runs it once (instead of putting it in the position to continually run) my car shouldn't break down
• gfxgirl 6y ago
  maybe not relevant here but my first thought to your question out of context is scale. My house can be easy entered by anyone determined to enter it. They can bust the door down, break the windows, crash a vehicle into it. And yet, almost no one is actually trying to get into my house. Conversely, 1000s of people and possibly hundreds of thousands of bots are trying to break into any software they can that is exposed on the internet (or possibly exposed in other ways like I have no idea if every app on my PC/Mac/Phone/Tablet is scanning my network for devices with known exploits) So, the security of my house (at least where I live) does not have to be so resilient but the security of much of my software does. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPBH1eW28mo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VPBH1eW28mo
• unhammer 6y ago
  If cars were used like software, fire engines would be dragging around truckloads of cars turned sideways with their gas tanks filled with water. Long-range drones would be flying around filling tanks of random parked cars with glue/sugar/squirrels/nuts covered in glue/sugar/other cars/fire engines/the tank itself.
• alpaca128 6y ago
  The car equivalent would rather be something like entering "null" as address in the car's GPS and this causing the entire town's traffic light control to crash. Wouldn't be that funny, would it? Then there's just annoying stuff like the case where someone paid to have "null" on their car's license plate, which suddenly caused him to get all traffic tickets that could not be correctly addressed.
• layer8 6y ago
  Because with software you can’t generally predict the consequences, even more so as software tends to not be static, but evolves and starts to interact with more and more other software. Validate your inputs. Be very careful with in-band special values and escaping syntax. Don’t make any assumptions about what is “reasonable” input. If you have to make assumptions, document them and validate all input for conformance. Always check what requirements and preconditions the code you call has on the values you pass to it. Don’t just make assumptions about it.
• Lazare 6y ago
  There's a few answers here. First off, we expect all things to be as resilient and reliable as makes sense via a cost benefit analysis. If it's cheap to fix, and expensive not to fix, we expect it to be done. If it's expensive to fix and cheap to ignore, we expect it not to be done. And of course, if it's impossible to fix, we definetly expect it to be ignored. :) So, we expect that cars should NOT catch fire when rear-ended, because it's possible to design them not to do so, it's not that expensive to design them not to do so, and innocent people could be seriously harmed through no fault of their own. But water in a gas tank? I can't think of a way to stop someone doing that. And it would just disable the car if you did it. And since cars have locking fuel tank covers, you're really limited in your ability to maliciously harm other peoples cars. So in the case of cars "explodes when rear ended" is not okay but "stops driving when you fill the tank with water" is okay. Software, by its design, is often more fixable than other things. You can filter the inputs to a log in form whereas you can't really filter "things people might put in their kitchen blender". Second, note that software is, bluntly, a lot less resilient than most things. I've got a hammer sitting in my garage, and it's just going to sit there until I do something with it. It won't randomly stop working, it won't auto-update to a version that is incompatible with my nails, it won't be remotely hijacked by Russian scammers to break into local businesses, it doesn't need patching. There will never be a CVE for this hammer. :) I've had it for many, many years, and I'll have it for many many more, and it will be just as good a hammer in 10 years as it was when I got it. We can't say the same thing for software. And since software is just way more of a dumpster fire than "normal" things, we have to expect that more work will need to be done to counteract that. (There is, as always, at least one relevant XKCD here. In this case, I think https://xkcd.com/2030/ https://xkcd.com/2030/ is on point. The more you know about software engineering, the more you'll realise the entire thing is held together with bailing wire, duct tape, luck, and an intern trying to live edit the production database to fix the data errors before anyone notices.) Third, and very much related to the last two points, consider the scale. Your car's gas tank, or your building;s sprinkler tank, are vulnerable to various attacks, but it's not vulnerable to being attacked remotely and untraceably by almost anyone on earth via a number of low skill attacks. And of course, software also can yield larger rewards. If the local corner store has a dodgy lock, maybe you could break into it (at significant risk to yourself!) and steal some cash from the till. If you can compromise the head office network of a major retailer, you could steal millions of dollars. Edit: Also, I'm aware of a nationwide outage for a pizza chain caused by a phonebook. There was an internal webpage that some stores looked at occasionally to show stock levels or something similar. It was quite a slow/expensive page to load, but because it was loaded quite rarely, and only by a small number of internal users, it didn't have a lot of cacheing or rate limiting on it. Someone in one store shifted something on their desk, then walked off. This caused a phonebook to shift, and depressed their F5 key. That caused their browser to start refreshing this page very, very rapidly - multiple times per second. The load from this actually overloaded the central servers, and the entire system went down, stopping orders from being placed or printing out. So it might seem silly to say "hey, what happens when I do this thing I shouldn't do", but actually, over time, all sorts of things that "shouldn't happen" will happen for some reason or other. If the result is that every store of a nation-wide chain goes offline, that is....not great. And software is just way more prone to these sorts of things than others. If you tell me there's a vulnerability that lets people easily open the door of any hotel room at a large chain, I'll instantly bet you $20 it involves smart locks, NOT traditional mechanical keyed locks. (And indeed, that's happened more than once, and it's always been a smart lock to my knowledge.)
• enobrev 6y ago
  With physical things, if I do something stupid, I blame myself. With software, if it allows me to do something stupid, I blame the software. Unfortunately, the same mindset carries for clients, employers, and other various people using software who will report said stupidity to me, my client, or my employer.
  • FalconSensei 6y ago
    Like, putting water on the gas tank is obviously wrong, as it's called a gas tank, and gas cars don't tend to run on water. Clicking a button that was enabled for me and does many things in the background is not so obvious. Also, cars have been accessible to everyone way longer that PCs and smartphones. Most people alive today (in developed countries/areas) saw their dads driving when they were kids. A person in their 60s didn't have a PC when growing up
    • CRConrad 6y ago
      I think not even most people in their fifties did. Forties, maybe.
• david422 6y ago
  I think the answer is - because the software can. And most of the time, the software can be more resilient with a trivial amount resource usage. If there was a physical device that could filter gas and non-gas liquids that could be installed in a car we would expect car manufacturers to do that. I have seen software that puts the onus on users to use it correctly "Hey user, don't enter more than 5 items in this list". Because the software can't be bothered. And if the user enters 6 items in the list and the software crashes and the user loses all their work, everybody can point at the user and tell them it's their fault for not following directions. But personally I'd be embarrassed if that was my software.
  • pitay 6y ago
    If there was a physical device that could filter gas and non-gas liquids that could be installed in a car we would expect car manufacturers to do that. There is one thing they could do to stop people putting the wrong liquid in their car. That is to key the nozzle to only fit cars which support their fuel, so petrol pumps nozzles only correctly fit petrol cars, diesel pumps only fit diesel cars. Completely agree with you on you main point, software should be made correct and resilient (more than other things) because it can be made so.
    • seren1 6y ago
      Having owned a diesel car, I can confirm this is actually the case. The nozzles where I live are are keyed to prevent mishaps.
• FalconSensei 6y ago
  > If I pour water in the gastank of my car, it will also fail to drive. But I'm pretty sure the manual say you shouldn't do that. Like microwaves say you can't put living animals in it.