7 ms·

This is a frustrating yet common sort of take. Yes, this is simple, as the article clearly points out. Yes it is obvious in retrospect. But did you do anything

This is a frustrating yet common sort of take. Yes, this is simple, as the article clearly points out. Yes it is obvious in retrospect. But did you do anything with your brilliant work besides bodge your terrible car a few more miles down the road? There is value to developing the entire system... to ensuring the keypad mechanism is reasonably robust and tamper proof. There is value to understanding the vehicle as a system and reasoning out this defense strategy. There will be value in preliminary productization of something this for mass production, especially as regards the use of that terrible 12v power port and providing the 'fingerprint' in a safe range of voltage fluctuations to avoid catastrophic and probably non-obvious failure modes. There will likely be D.O.T. paperwork, and UL listing. $1.2 million is probably a bit meager to truly develop something like this. Yes, you can hobble some crap together on your Montero. Congratulation. Hardly a solid foundation to speak ill of this team doing something genuinely productive.

K0balt 3y ago
No, really, good for them. But don’t be talking down on my car. That’s just not cool. That beast is the workhorse of the farm and it gets the job done. None of the windows roll down though and it’s hot as hell inside, so it discourages unnecessary use, saving the planet. It rarely sees pavement but it drags what needs to be dragged and it pulls the utility rigs out after they deliver to us.
- DanHulton 3y ago
  And that's all well and good, but maybe introspect here for a second? You're upset that your accomplishments aren't being respected, immediately after discounting the accomplishments of others. The point is that your car's modifications and the university's are similar, but different, particularly in scale and broad robustness, which adds difficulty in ways you may not be appreciating. $1.2 million may sound like a lot to you, but to pay a team of people to work on, and provide materials for them to work with (especially cars, which generally aren't cheap, especially used cars right now!)... Well, it likely doesn't go as far as you think it does.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    Did you see the picture of what they built? I wouldn’t describe it as refined or particularly professional. It sounds like his system is more refined than the academic one. It certainly has more features.
  - fdr 3y ago
    The professor did gloss over briefly the difficulty in making the system work for a large number of vehicles, before arriving at a viable "signature" idea, as the article describes. Sounds like an area with a lot of false starts (heh) and time consumption, and dead ends.
    - dghlsakjg 3y ago
      The professor should have seen that he could send a signature over the airwaves to his relay since that is even more universally compatible… plus, you can buy that exact device for about $20 at the online retailer of your choice.
    - K0balt 3y ago
      Vectorising the power profiles makes this a no brainier. I’ve done it, and I have no brain.
  - ModernMech 3y ago
    $1.2 million will fund 4 years of research for 2 professors, and 2 PhD students. It’s not exactly a career making grant.
    - xwdv 3y ago
      That seems extravagant. By my calculations it should fund approximately 6 or so years.
      - neuronerdgirl 3y ago
        Cover the two PhD students at the NIH payscales for PhD students on a standard training grant[1] ($43,894 not including benefits) and you've used up over a quarter of your budget on less than half the salary needs, completely ignoring any research costs that need to be covered on top of the much higher payscales of the professors. Plus a large number of PhD students in this kind of work make more than the states stipend above. Not extravagant. https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-national-research-service-award-nrsa-stipends-tuitionfees-and#:~:text=NIH%20Monthly%20Stipend%20FY%202023&text=FY%202023%20Stipend%20for%20Predoctoral,fellows%20are%20increased%20to%20%2412%2C200 https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-nati....
- seemack 3y ago
  1 line barely acknowledging the criticism, 4 lines defending the car whose feelings I can assume have been mortally wounded. The defensiveness around the car is ironic given how casually you threw out your needlessly negative hot-take.
  - K0balt 3y ago
    Nah, you can’t hurt pure evil. It just sits there, awaiting its next victim. I hate that beast, but it’s my beast to hate. You can’t just talk shit about it from your comfy chair, or sitting on the toilet with no circulation to your feet, or whatever — that’s something you earn. You earn it with mild first degree burns on your right leg and tinnitus like the rest of us. If I seem abrasive and unnecessarily combative, it’s probably just the incessant itching of my leg and the trauma from driving that thing.
- spell-slinger 3y ago
  He sounds like a monster of a vehicle. Loyal and strong. The goodest of cars.
brk 3y ago
It is obvious in retrospect because this concept has been around for 30 years. A common killswitch mechanism that I remember being implemented in the early 90's was a system that tied into accessory devices. On my friends car you had to put the key to ACC, then turn the cruise control on and off, and then engage and disengage the parking brake before the car would start. No other obvious lights, buttons, switches, etc. And you could install the killswitch device to tie into basically any 2 systems that used battery power.
- rhaway84773 3y ago
  And despite being around for 30+ years it’s not broadly adopted despite a significant rise in car thefts.
  - vkou 3y ago
    Is there actually a significant rise in car thefts? Or did we just hit an acute rise in car thefts of two particular models, caused by the discovery (Well, publication, really) that they are still using 30-year-old security?
    - janalsncm 3y ago
      Good question, it seems like car theft is on the rise, yes. And it’s spiking in particular metro areas (Milwaukee, Chicago) more than average, although national trends are also up. https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CCJ%E2%80%93Crime-Trends-Year-End-2022-Word-for-PDF.pdf https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CCJ%E2%80...
      - andirk 3y ago
        In California, if youre car is stolen and then found, the cops will give you a fat ticket and tow your car and then give you a ticket for it getting towed. Somehow getting the car towed is also a ticket.
        3y ago
foooorsyth 3y ago
I work for a major OEM in automotive. Getting ANYTHING “simple” into real cars, especially anything related to physical access and starting the vehicle, is a huge undertaking. $1.2 mm is cheap for this sort of feature, assuming that money goes to the actual implementation, standardization, homologation, and integration on the assembly line.
- f1shy 3y ago
  Car OEM are far as example of efficient work…
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
    It’s not efficient. That’s the point. The car is a complicated product. It’s not a website. It’s not an app. My employer has 120k+ employees and factories in every continent except Antarctica. Regulatory bodies interject with anything related to access and security, and those bodies are different in every country/region. The product itself is massive physical good that many countries consider domestic production of which to be a matter of national security. Every single physical change to the product is analyzed by bean counters. Shipping the product requires at least some level of expertise in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, hardware, software, and manufacturing. You need factories, regulatory approval, supplier networks, programmers, drivetrain engineers, management, people to lobby the government, accountants, and much more. You need it all. You’d be shocked at how difficult adding a single physical button to any given car can be. Scoffing at $1.2mm for a new ECU that relates to security is naive. “I could do this in one day in my garage” is not how shipping a change to automotive products works.
- _ea1k 3y ago
  > $1.2 mm is cheap for this sort of feature, assuming that money goes to the actual implementation, standardization, homologation, and integration on the assembly line. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it sounded like the $1.2mm went to some prototypes and a research paper.
  - foooorsyth 3y ago
cdchn 3y ago
This is the same kind of take as going to a nice restaurant and loudly exclaiming "$50 for a steak?! I could pay $8 at the butcher and make the same thing at home!"
- mcpackieh 3y ago
  It's more like a researcher getting a $1M grant to study whether putting salt on a steak makes it taste better, and a chef saying "Wtf, we've been doing this forever"
mNovak 3y ago
To be fair, most universities are great at interesting research but are also terrible at even preliminary productization. I highly doubt this $1.2M will go towards DOT paperwork and UL listing. This will go to a research prototype, then either get dropped off at the tech transfer IP office (good luck there), or spin out a startup. In the latter case, I'd have much rather seen this grant go directly to the startup, than pay the high Uni overhead.
jabart 3y ago
$1.2 million sounds like a lot but there is a team of people working on it for a whole year. There is some insurance OP doesn't have in case it's proven one of these devices did cause a crash. If this was some Kickstarter I feel like it would cost more and be 3 years behind already.
olyjohn 3y ago
That's the problem with the whole concept. Anybody can build a shockingly simple kill switch for $5 and a 5 video on YouTube. What are they trying to bring to market exactly? Cars have been around for 100 years and there have been hundreds if not thousands of these things brought to production during that time. They're all junk, they all fail and flop. And great if you thing that those voltage fluctuations are gonna be consistent. Eventually some switch will corrode and then the person's wiper switch won't fluctuate the voltage properly. Nobody will want to reset their clocks using this every time they get in the car. Your break-in alarm won't work with the battery disconnectred. Car manufacturers will be pissed that you're disconnecting the battery because they can't get your telemetry and the car can't update while you're not int it. And then when you have problems, this will be the first thing ripped out of the car by your mechanic. This whole concept is flawed, and anybody with basic car or electronics knowledge will stay away from this thing because they can do it themselves. And here's the kicker... anybody who doesn't have basic knowledge won't be hooking this thing up to their battery. They are terrified of even touching the battery. Congratulations on your marketing BS, but it's clearly not thought out from a common sense perspective at all.
- dcow 3y ago
  If you read TFA then you'd realize they've solved almost every issue you throw down. They allow enough current through to power electronics (like your break-in alarm) but not enough to turn the engine over. The target market for this is not "anyone with basic car or electronics knowledge who can do it themselves"... it's, "people who want an extra level of defense against car thieves".
dghlsakjg 3y ago
There are dozens of similar mechanisms for sale on Amazon/aliexpress. A car alarm with an immobilizer is more advanced than this “innovation”. They are claiming that the novel part is using voltage fluctuations to unarm the immobilizer and claiming that it requires less installation since the signaler device can plug directly into the cigarette outlet. A wireless relay requires the same cuttoff relay installation as their “new” idea, but is even more convenient because you don’t have to install a bodged together keypad on the cigarette lighter, and short your electrical system to cause voltage fluctuations. They have blown through 1.2mm in grant money and their product is a bunch of prototype parts from a $50 arduino starter kit. It isn’t polished, it isn’t ready for consumers, it is a single prototype. I guess the idea of causing voltage fluctuations is novel, but they sort of reinvented a $30 wheel for 1.2 million.
pavon 3y ago
There is zero novel research here, and the entire purpose of the 1.2 million dollar grant was research. All the value you are mentioning is related to bringing a product to market, which is something that the grant did not require and universities don't usually follow through. Most of the time transition to industry happens is when there are motivated companies who do all the work to bring the device to market, but need university patent licenses and expertise to do so. This would be a great senior project, but it is a complete waste of money for a cyber security grant.
- memetomancer 3y ago
  I disagree: the device monitors battery fluctuations to 'authenticate' the driver. the fluctuations need to be a specific pattern - delivered either by a device plugged into the 12v accessory port, or by some specific pattern of driver behavior, such as quickly flashing lights, activating wipers, etc. This is indeed a novel approach. And it is a fair sight more involved than a simple kill switch, by the look of things. The research aspect comes from exploring the practicality of such an approach. This exploration requires prototypes, test beds and investigators. Who's really to say what the results of the research will be, at this point? In my opinion, I think smart phones and NFC are probably the way to go... but I'm not going to hop on the internet and make scornful remarks until I know more. I'm not sure why you have done so?
Gordonjcp 3y ago
> There is value to developing the entire system... to ensuring the keypad mechanism is reasonably robust and tamper proof. There is value to understanding the vehicle as a system and reasoning out this defense strategy. There will be value in preliminary productization of something this for mass production, https://a.allegroimg.com/original/03e206/1de3f26447d794282467bf442e1a/CITROEN-XM-MK1-KLAWIATURA-KODU-IMMO-ORG-BDB https://a.allegroimg.com/original/03e206/1de3f26447d79428246... Optional extra on Series 1 Citroën XMs, an immobiliser keypad programmed into the engine ECU. It cost about 100 quid in 1990 money, on a 40 grand luxury car. Most V6es and 2.5 diesels had them, few 4-cyl petrols or 2.1 diesels had them. There's no need to spend $1.2M developing something that's already existed for a long time. This was actually a development of a similar keypad fitted to most Citroën CX Turbos, from the mid-1980s. The idea is nearly 40 years old. It's inexpensive proven technology, and it works well.

K0balt 3y ago

No, really, good for them. But don’t be talking down on my car. That’s just not cool. That beast is the workhorse of the farm and it gets the job done. None of the windows roll down though and it’s hot as hell inside, so it discourages unnecessary use, saving the planet. It rarely sees pavement but it drags what needs to be dragged and it pulls the utility rigs out after they deliver to us.

DanHulton 3y ago
And that's all well and good, but maybe introspect here for a second? You're upset that your accomplishments aren't being respected, immediately after discounting the accomplishments of others. The point is that your car's modifications and the university's are similar, but different, particularly in scale and broad robustness, which adds difficulty in ways you may not be appreciating. $1.2 million may sound like a lot to you, but to pay a team of people to work on, and provide materials for them to work with (especially cars, which generally aren't cheap, especially used cars right now!)... Well, it likely doesn't go as far as you think it does.
- dghlsakjg 3y ago
  Did you see the picture of what they built? I wouldn’t describe it as refined or particularly professional. It sounds like his system is more refined than the academic one. It certainly has more features.
- fdr 3y ago
  The professor did gloss over briefly the difficulty in making the system work for a large number of vehicles, before arriving at a viable "signature" idea, as the article describes. Sounds like an area with a lot of false starts (heh) and time consumption, and dead ends.
  - dghlsakjg 3y ago
    The professor should have seen that he could send a signature over the airwaves to his relay since that is even more universally compatible… plus, you can buy that exact device for about $20 at the online retailer of your choice.
  - K0balt 3y ago
    Vectorising the power profiles makes this a no brainier. I’ve done it, and I have no brain.
- ModernMech 3y ago
  $1.2 million will fund 4 years of research for 2 professors, and 2 PhD students. It’s not exactly a career making grant.
  - xwdv 3y ago
    That seems extravagant. By my calculations it should fund approximately 6 or so years.
    - neuronerdgirl 3y ago
      Cover the two PhD students at the NIH payscales for PhD students on a standard training grant[1] ($43,894 not including benefits) and you've used up over a quarter of your budget on less than half the salary needs, completely ignoring any research costs that need to be covered on top of the much higher payscales of the professors. Plus a large number of PhD students in this kind of work make more than the states stipend above. Not extravagant. https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-national-research-service-award-nrsa-stipends-tuitionfees-and#:~:text=NIH%20Monthly%20Stipend%20FY%202023&text=FY%202023%20Stipend%20for%20Predoctoral,fellows%20are%20increased%20to%20%2412%2C200 https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-nati....
seemack 3y ago
1 line barely acknowledging the criticism, 4 lines defending the car whose feelings I can assume have been mortally wounded. The defensiveness around the car is ironic given how casually you threw out your needlessly negative hot-take.
- K0balt 3y ago
  Nah, you can’t hurt pure evil. It just sits there, awaiting its next victim. I hate that beast, but it’s my beast to hate. You can’t just talk shit about it from your comfy chair, or sitting on the toilet with no circulation to your feet, or whatever — that’s something you earn. You earn it with mild first degree burns on your right leg and tinnitus like the rest of us. If I seem abrasive and unnecessarily combative, it’s probably just the incessant itching of my leg and the trauma from driving that thing.
spell-slinger 3y ago
He sounds like a monster of a vehicle. Loyal and strong. The goodest of cars.

brk 3y ago

It is obvious in retrospect because this concept has been around for 30 years. A common killswitch mechanism that I remember being implemented in the early 90's was a system that tied into accessory devices. On my friends car you had to put the key to ACC, then turn the cruise control on and off, and then engage and disengage the parking brake before the car would start. No other obvious lights, buttons, switches, etc. And you could install the killswitch device to tie into basically any 2 systems that used battery power.

rhaway84773 3y ago
And despite being around for 30+ years it’s not broadly adopted despite a significant rise in car thefts.
- vkou 3y ago
  Is there actually a significant rise in car thefts? Or did we just hit an acute rise in car thefts of two particular models, caused by the discovery (Well, publication, really) that they are still using 30-year-old security?
  - janalsncm 3y ago
    Good question, it seems like car theft is on the rise, yes. And it’s spiking in particular metro areas (Milwaukee, Chicago) more than average, although national trends are also up. https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CCJ%E2%80%93Crime-Trends-Year-End-2022-Word-for-PDF.pdf https://counciloncj.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/01/CCJ%E2%80...
    - andirk 3y ago
      In California, if youre car is stolen and then found, the cops will give you a fat ticket and tow your car and then give you a ticket for it getting towed. Somehow getting the car towed is also a ticket.
      - 3y ago

foooorsyth 3y ago

I work for a major OEM in automotive. Getting ANYTHING “simple” into real cars, especially anything related to physical access and starting the vehicle, is a huge undertaking. $1.2 mm is cheap for this sort of feature, assuming that money goes to the actual implementation, standardization, homologation, and integration on the assembly line.

f1shy 3y ago
Car OEM are far as example of efficient work…
- foooorsyth 3y ago
  It’s not efficient. That’s the point. The car is a complicated product. It’s not a website. It’s not an app. My employer has 120k+ employees and factories in every continent except Antarctica. Regulatory bodies interject with anything related to access and security, and those bodies are different in every country/region. The product itself is massive physical good that many countries consider domestic production of which to be a matter of national security. Every single physical change to the product is analyzed by bean counters. Shipping the product requires at least some level of expertise in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, hardware, software, and manufacturing. You need factories, regulatory approval, supplier networks, programmers, drivetrain engineers, management, people to lobby the government, accountants, and much more. You need it all. You’d be shocked at how difficult adding a single physical button to any given car can be. Scoffing at $1.2mm for a new ECU that relates to security is naive. “I could do this in one day in my garage” is not how shipping a change to automotive products works.
_ea1k 3y ago
> $1.2 mm is cheap for this sort of feature, assuming that money goes to the actual implementation, standardization, homologation, and integration on the assembly line. Maybe I'm reading it wrong, but it sounded like the $1.2mm went to some prototypes and a research paper.
- foooorsyth 3y ago

cdchn 3y ago

This is the same kind of take as going to a nice restaurant and loudly exclaiming "$50 for a steak?! I could pay $8 at the butcher and make the same thing at home!"

mcpackieh 3y ago
It's more like a researcher getting a $1M grant to study whether putting salt on a steak makes it taste better, and a chef saying "Wtf, we've been doing this forever"

mNovak 3y ago

To be fair, most universities are great at interesting research but are also terrible at even preliminary productization. I highly doubt this $1.2M will go towards DOT paperwork and UL listing. This will go to a research prototype, then either get dropped off at the tech transfer IP office (good luck there), or spin out a startup. In the latter case, I'd have much rather seen this grant go directly to the startup, than pay the high Uni overhead.

jabart 3y ago

$1.2 million sounds like a lot but there is a team of people working on it for a whole year. There is some insurance OP doesn't have in case it's proven one of these devices did cause a crash. If this was some Kickstarter I feel like it would cost more and be 3 years behind already.

olyjohn 3y ago

That's the problem with the whole concept. Anybody can build a shockingly simple kill switch for $5 and a 5 video on YouTube. What are they trying to bring to market exactly? Cars have been around for 100 years and there have been hundreds if not thousands of these things brought to production during that time. They're all junk, they all fail and flop. And great if you thing that those voltage fluctuations are gonna be consistent. Eventually some switch will corrode and then the person's wiper switch won't fluctuate the voltage properly. Nobody will want to reset their clocks using this every time they get in the car. Your break-in alarm won't work with the battery disconnectred. Car manufacturers will be pissed that you're disconnecting the battery because they can't get your telemetry and the car can't update while you're not int it. And then when you have problems, this will be the first thing ripped out of the car by your mechanic. This whole concept is flawed, and anybody with basic car or electronics knowledge will stay away from this thing because they can do it themselves. And here's the kicker... anybody who doesn't have basic knowledge won't be hooking this thing up to their battery. They are terrified of even touching the battery. Congratulations on your marketing BS, but it's clearly not thought out from a common sense perspective at all.

dcow 3y ago
If you read TFA then you'd realize they've solved almost every issue you throw down. They allow enough current through to power electronics (like your break-in alarm) but not enough to turn the engine over. The target market for this is not "anyone with basic car or electronics knowledge who can do it themselves"... it's, "people who want an extra level of defense against car thieves".

dghlsakjg 3y ago

There are dozens of similar mechanisms for sale on Amazon/aliexpress. A car alarm with an immobilizer is more advanced than this “innovation”. They are claiming that the novel part is using voltage fluctuations to unarm the immobilizer and claiming that it requires less installation since the signaler device can plug directly into the cigarette outlet. A wireless relay requires the same cuttoff relay installation as their “new” idea, but is even more convenient because you don’t have to install a bodged together keypad on the cigarette lighter, and short your electrical system to cause voltage fluctuations. They have blown through 1.2mm in grant money and their product is a bunch of prototype parts from a $50 arduino starter kit. It isn’t polished, it isn’t ready for consumers, it is a single prototype. I guess the idea of causing voltage fluctuations is novel, but they sort of reinvented a $30 wheel for 1.2 million.

pavon 3y ago

There is zero novel research here, and the entire purpose of the 1.2 million dollar grant was research. All the value you are mentioning is related to bringing a product to market, which is something that the grant did not require and universities don't usually follow through. Most of the time transition to industry happens is when there are motivated companies who do all the work to bring the device to market, but need university patent licenses and expertise to do so. This would be a great senior project, but it is a complete waste of money for a cyber security grant.

memetomancer 3y ago
I disagree: the device monitors battery fluctuations to 'authenticate' the driver. the fluctuations need to be a specific pattern - delivered either by a device plugged into the 12v accessory port, or by some specific pattern of driver behavior, such as quickly flashing lights, activating wipers, etc. This is indeed a novel approach. And it is a fair sight more involved than a simple kill switch, by the look of things. The research aspect comes from exploring the practicality of such an approach. This exploration requires prototypes, test beds and investigators. Who's really to say what the results of the research will be, at this point? In my opinion, I think smart phones and NFC are probably the way to go... but I'm not going to hop on the internet and make scornful remarks until I know more. I'm not sure why you have done so?

Gordonjcp 3y ago

> There is value to developing the entire system... to ensuring the keypad mechanism is reasonably robust and tamper proof. There is value to understanding the vehicle as a system and reasoning out this defense strategy. There will be value in preliminary productization of something this for mass production, https://a.allegroimg.com/original/03e206/1de3f26447d794282467bf442e1a/CITROEN-XM-MK1-KLAWIATURA-KODU-IMMO-ORG-BDB https://a.allegroimg.com/original/03e206/1de3f26447d79428246... Optional extra on Series 1 Citroën XMs, an immobiliser keypad programmed into the engine ECU. It cost about 100 quid in 1990 money, on a 40 grand luxury car. Most V6es and 2.5 diesels had them, few 4-cyl petrols or 2.1 diesels had them. There's no need to spend $1.2M developing something that's already existed for a long time. This was actually a development of a similar keypad fitted to most Citroën CX Turbos, from the mid-1980s. The idea is nearly 40 years old. It's inexpensive proven technology, and it works well.