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As software now sits between pedal and brake and cars are beginning to be increasingly connected should we expect to see more assassinations performed this way?

by sambeau 15y ago

As software now sits between pedal and brake and cars are beginning to be increasingly connected should we expect to see more assassinations performed this way? Google now has a fully-functional driverless car and at least one US state has approved their use on the road. Who needs polonium when you can send a virus out to seek a car?

nekitamo 15y ago
The potential to murder with computers has been around for a while already. Governments are just waking up to it. To use the classical example: imagine hacking into a hospital network and changing a patient's blood type...
- munin 15y ago
  scary thing (imo) is that computer hacking is (compared to what you would otherwise have to do) so low cost and low risk that now "unknowable" assassinations (i.e. difficult or impossible to tell if the death was an accident or not) are within reach of everyone ...
  - trebor 15y ago
    I disagree. One, you must have the knowledge of how to hack that specific car's ECU. You must know the make, model, and exact ECU of the car. Two, you have to actually be familiar with reverse-engineering ECUs to begin with. Three, you need special equipment to connect to an ECU diagnostically, let alone in a way to reprogram it. This adds up to a lot of hassle, and greatly limits the number of people who have the skills to pull this off. Who would develop this method but a government with the time/manpower to create and test it? And, if the government wants you assassinated, why would the government allow a real/accurate investigation anyway? It would be far simpler to create a small microcircuit to play havoc the the ECU, than to hack the ECU. But, even then you'd primarily just lose mileage (and a mechanic would quickly locate it).
    - sambeau 15y ago
      That requires physical access to the car.
    - gcb 15y ago
      like script kiddies doesn't learn all that to just deface websites already....
      - trebor 15y ago
        Unlike a website, a car requires access to a physical, proprietary interface to embedded components. You must craft an attack to the interface and ECU. And there are chips that can have their memory permanently burned into them (I don't know if ECUs use them, however). Patches are impossible, but there's no risk of infection either. Just test it rigorously first.
        owenmarshall 15y ago
        >Unlike a website, a car requires access to a physical, proprietary interface to embedded components. That's not necessarily true. For example, my car's ECU can be reprogrammed using the instrumentation bus. The instrumentation bus can be accessed using the wires that interface with the CD changer. That means that the audio system is on the same network as the ECU -- and if I had a Bluetooth adapter, that'd likely be on the same network as well. Indeed, researchers can disable electronically controlled brakes via Bluetooth: http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35094/?ref=rss&a=f http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/35094/?ref=rss&#38... >Patches are impossible I've had to take my car in for patches a few times. Where there is software, there will be patches required. At the end of the day, I doubt we will be seeing assassinations via car hacking. But I wouldn't call it impossible.
        gcb 15y ago
        exactly. and even more worrisome, on-start shenanigans is tied to all kinds of sensors on your car. and it has a data connection. 24/7.
- AndyJPartridge 15y ago
  You know, that's the first good reason I've ever heard for me getting a tattoo.
- rcxdude 15y ago
  AFAIK a bedside test is always done before a transfusion, simply because the records cannot be trusted even without malicious intervention (and a test is pretty easy to do).
mkr-hn 15y ago
It's a complex attack vector for a simple problem. If you have enough access to tamper with the software, why not just remove the cap from the brake fluid reservoir? It's faster than figuring out how to access the PCM [1] (to tinker with the throttle code) and less likely to fail. And it would be catastrophically poor planning on the part of car designers to make car firmware remotely modifiable. We're not talking about general purpose computers here. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_control_unit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engine_control_unit
- trebor 15y ago
  Except that the target may discover the leak, and the lack of ability to brake; newer cars will warn when the fluid pressure is low. Switching the car to first gear to slow could get the driver out of immediate danger. I think the emergency brake uses a wire that is directly connected to the brakes. However, I do presume that the victim is paying attention to their vehicle and not in a sudden emergency condition.
- sambeau 15y ago
  It's a vector, however, that needs no physical access to the car. It can be launched remotely from another country. Who would have thought a centrifuge could be attacked in this way?
  - FaceKicker 15y ago
    > It's a vector, however, that needs no physical access to the car. Are you sure about that? I can't imagine they'd put these autonomous driving systems on the network... Didn't Stuxnet itself require at least physical access by proxy in that it was propagated through USB drives being physically used in the victim's systems?
    - owenmarshall 15y ago
      Many cars have Bluetooth support. All it takes from there is the engineer putting the powertrain bus/ECU on the same network with the Bluetooth adapter. As I posted below, my Saab's engine control unit can be reprogrammed by splicing a few wires onto the CD harness. That means the audio network can at least access the ECU. I don't have a Bluetooth adapter on my car, but if I did, I'd wager it can access the audio network...
funkah 15y ago
That's not what bothers me about software being used in important physical systems like the brakes of a car. What bothers me about that is not knowing anything about how that software was developed or tested, the amount of rigor that went into it, etc. All software has bugs but the laws of physics don't.

munin 15y ago

i don't like "you must have the knowledge of how.." based arguments. how expensive is this knowledge? bored undergrads at good to decent schools learn enough to pull this kind of thing off given a few K in bootstrap money. organized crime has both the will and the funds to do something like this. so could an independent person... you're talking $50-$75k and 6 months of a persons time to figure out how to delete someone without anyone even thinking it was murder? the advantage of "hacking" the ECU is that by making changes in software you can make changes that can't be detected by a mechanic or by a vigilant pre-drive screen of your car. after i read the autosec.org paper my first thought was "this is dumb, it requires physical access to the car to pull off, i already have that, i can perform hundreds of other types of physical sabotage to make the car crash. nothing new here." a few weeks later i realized "wait a minute, if i make a change in software, it can theoretically remain undetected forever before i activate it. also, nothing the operator does to find it could work. also, if i die in a wreck on the freeway that looks like i just lost control of my car, will the state police rip apart the wreckage, find the ECU, and verify that it hasn't been tampered with? will they know how to? will they even think to do that? and even then it wouldn't matter because the software could erase itself from permanent storage just-in-time..." there are a lot of advantages and i think the barrier to entry is a lot lower than you say it is.

trebor 15y ago
Perhaps the barrier is lower. But understand my position: I am not an advocate of automated cars, or even highly computerized cars. The more computerized the car becomes the more points of failure it gets, whether that be a dropped internet/GPS connection, a hardware glitch, or "cosmic rays" (which got the blame for the Prius brake issues). It takes significant developmental effort to hack the ECU. And if you don't want the changes to be detectable by mechanics or a prescreen drive test, you need to be especially cautious in your changes. You must disassemble and analyze the ENTIRE codebase of the ECU to determine where you want your changes to reside, then pack it back in. A simple countermeasure is to let the mechanics look at the ECU version checksum. Standardize the checksum across the model, with subsequent patches being listed as a different version number. Then the mechanic checks with the official manufacturer's guide and you know if there's a problem. You are sounding paranoid. Physical security is always the first, and most effective barrier. If the interface were better secured digitally, it wouldn't take a genius to access the ECU's circuitry and wire an extension. But again, it takes significant investment. If the ECU is modified to accelerate at maximum speed at some random moment, the only thing necessary to defeat it is switching into neutral and pulling off the road! The range of destructiveness the ECU can cause is limited, though it can rack up your repair bills. Crime syndicates usually buy shares in the local police force. If you meet a mysterious end in a car accident the investigation would be tampered with regardless of the method used to kill you. Theory is wildly different from reality.