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Computer-driven cars will introduce tons of new hacking possibilites from the malicious actors, some possible news headlines: The car unexpectedly accelerated

Computer-driven cars will introduce tons of new hacking possibilites from the malicious actors, some possible news headlines: The car unexpectedly accelerated and killed 5 people, an accident or a murder? A new ransomware demands 1 BTC to start your car Google keeps all the history of your car's movements LAPD is testing a special device to remotely stop cars instead of chasing them

vl 13y ago
> LAPD is testing a special device to remotely stop cars instead of chasing them This is already a reality, watch commercial for OnStar, this is exactly what they do.
ihsw 13y ago
Can't forget insurance fraud. I foresee a future where insurance companies will impose additional fees to cars that are "assisted" rather than fully autonomous. What is assisted? A car fitted with the self-driving computer, but rather than driving the car it instead compares your actions with one the computer would normally do. What is this comparison for? To determine whether you are a safe driver -- a Safe Driver Rating (SDR). Self-driving cars will become the new gold standard for determining who is a safe driver -- and failing to meet that standard will result in higher insurance rates. What does this have to do with malicious hackers? They can fudge the self-driving computer to silently and gradually increase your insurance rates by misreporting your SDR. What about cars that are neither fully autonomous nor "assisted"? Simple: they don't get built/sold anymore due to being unsafe.
- VLM 13y ago
  One interesting side effect of a safe driver rating is you need to balance the cost of having to pay higher insurance with having to find a new job. Or another interesting problem is how do you push a self driving car beyond its performance boundaries to save your life? "I'm sorry dave, but I can't let you drive during a hurricane/tsunami warning" "hey car, shut up and drive, the storm surge is rising and unless you get moving you're about to transform into a submarine" If you get fired from your job because your self driving car decided its not going out in 1 inch of snow, how much do you sue the manufacturer? Or the other way around, your self driving car permitted you to go out in a 24 inch blizzard and it got stuck and you died, how much does your estate and survivors get to sue the manufacturer?" Obviously the proud american tradition of screw the little guy means the mfgrs can do anything they want, but the PR implications mean all self driving cars will shut off whenever the chance of precip is above 0%, or the temp is below 32F, etc. And THATs why I don't want a self driving car, it'll be useless in order to be legally intrinsically safe (only valid operating conditions will be 70 degrees, sunny, daytime, etc, which is about 2 weeks per year where I live.)
  - noonespecial 13y ago
    What if your car, networked with all of the other cars in the immediate area, came to the conclusion that a fatal collision was unavoidable unless one car (your car) purposely veered over the side of a bridge... The good of the many outwieghs the good of the few, and you're the few?
    - dandrews 13y ago
      Unless you paid extra for the level-2 protection package. Then the network has to select a level-1 vehicle to go over the edge.
      - noonespecial 13y ago
        That really is a terrifying thought if you follow it. It won't be so blatant. Probably more like "everyone knows that Volvo AI's get in way less fatal crashes than "cheaper" Chevy AI's". Considering human nature, I don't think I can imagine a way where this won't happen on some level or another.
    - derleth 13y ago
      A child runs into the street. The only place to swerve is into a few senior citizens. The kid's dead, right? Obviously the seniors have seniority, you must Respect Your Elders, and their estates can pay for much better attorneys that a grieving young couple can. I just wonder if the software will be smart enough to know that.
    - maxerickson 13y ago
      The network so awful it can't prevent fatal crashes on bridges but so awesome it can pick who dies when they happen.
  - krapp 13y ago
    >all self driving cars will shut off whenever the chance of precip is above 0%, or the temp is below 32F, etc. No, they'll probably still work. You'll just have to pay a premium for driving in "unsafe conditions" and "unsafe areas."
- loup-vaillant 13y ago
  Something I don't get: what is assisted driving for? I can see it being used in a transition period, where we want to assess the reliability of computers, get a corpus… But once the car can drive itself, why not let it? That way, no matter how unreliable you are, it won't influence the car. Higher insurance rates will be only for people who insist on driving their cars. I believe this would be a very good thing.
  - krapp 13y ago
    A system in which no one ever has any control over where their vehicles choose to take them is not necessarily benign. Such a system can be tampered with, taken over or simply glitch because some idiot caused an overflow or the maps are inaccurate or all of a sudden $something_inefficient. The purpose of 'assisted' driving lies in the premise that a 'perfectly' automated system doesn't exist, and will fail, and when it does, it should fail to wetware.
    - graylights 13y ago
      The notion of "control" is silly, you will still be the captain of the car, just not the driver. What if the wetware system kills 100 times as many people, should you still be able arbitrarily override the automated driver? I already accept a lot of places that I should let machines handle a task for me. I drive an automatic transmission rather then shift myself. I have traction control that overrides my foot to give me better control of the car. I fly in planes that are mostly flown by autopilot. Assisted driving will only be a short stopgap. It will be quickly gotten rid of because of cost to maintain two systems and because the ugliness of a "drivers seat". Interiors will look nothing like they do now. There will be no drive-shaft (fully electric) so no big bump or center console in middle of car. No steering column, no mirrors and a completely different arrangement of seats then now. In other words a fully automated car looks nothing like an assisted driving car. I doubt people are going to want to pay more and sit in less comfortable cabin, just for the opportunity to override the computer driver.
      - krapp 13y ago
- huherto 13y ago
  I would imagine that critical systems will be kept isolated from the rest of the systems.
  - krapp 13y ago
    Also likely (based on actual trends), critical systems will be directly connected to the internet, and protected by a single company wide default password.
nyarlathotep 13y ago
This may interest you: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf
stormbrew 13y ago
It's not as if it's particularly difficult to tamper with traffic flow now, as it stands. Take down a stop sign, mess with traffic light signalling (popular in movies about terrorist madmen), just plain go up to a car and hijack it. The crackdown on people doing this, however, is enormous. It makes it very unprofitable to do any of these things.
Brakenshire 13y ago
The potential for centralized surveillance and control which exists in all digital systems will become a more and more important issue as these devices progressively become ubiquitous. The same applies to driverless cars as to smartphones, electronic medical records, reading of news articles, social media, etc, etc.

vl 13y ago

> LAPD is testing a special device to remotely stop cars instead of chasing them This is already a reality, watch commercial for OnStar, this is exactly what they do.

ihsw 13y ago

Can't forget insurance fraud. I foresee a future where insurance companies will impose additional fees to cars that are "assisted" rather than fully autonomous. What is assisted? A car fitted with the self-driving computer, but rather than driving the car it instead compares your actions with one the computer would normally do. What is this comparison for? To determine whether you are a safe driver -- a Safe Driver Rating (SDR). Self-driving cars will become the new gold standard for determining who is a safe driver -- and failing to meet that standard will result in higher insurance rates. What does this have to do with malicious hackers? They can fudge the self-driving computer to silently and gradually increase your insurance rates by misreporting your SDR. What about cars that are neither fully autonomous nor "assisted"? Simple: they don't get built/sold anymore due to being unsafe.

VLM 13y ago
One interesting side effect of a safe driver rating is you need to balance the cost of having to pay higher insurance with having to find a new job. Or another interesting problem is how do you push a self driving car beyond its performance boundaries to save your life? "I'm sorry dave, but I can't let you drive during a hurricane/tsunami warning" "hey car, shut up and drive, the storm surge is rising and unless you get moving you're about to transform into a submarine" If you get fired from your job because your self driving car decided its not going out in 1 inch of snow, how much do you sue the manufacturer? Or the other way around, your self driving car permitted you to go out in a 24 inch blizzard and it got stuck and you died, how much does your estate and survivors get to sue the manufacturer?" Obviously the proud american tradition of screw the little guy means the mfgrs can do anything they want, but the PR implications mean all self driving cars will shut off whenever the chance of precip is above 0%, or the temp is below 32F, etc. And THATs why I don't want a self driving car, it'll be useless in order to be legally intrinsically safe (only valid operating conditions will be 70 degrees, sunny, daytime, etc, which is about 2 weeks per year where I live.)
- noonespecial 13y ago
  What if your car, networked with all of the other cars in the immediate area, came to the conclusion that a fatal collision was unavoidable unless one car (your car) purposely veered over the side of a bridge... The good of the many outwieghs the good of the few, and you're the few?
  - dandrews 13y ago
    Unless you paid extra for the level-2 protection package. Then the network has to select a level-1 vehicle to go over the edge.
    - noonespecial 13y ago
      That really is a terrifying thought if you follow it. It won't be so blatant. Probably more like "everyone knows that Volvo AI's get in way less fatal crashes than "cheaper" Chevy AI's". Considering human nature, I don't think I can imagine a way where this won't happen on some level or another.
  - derleth 13y ago
    A child runs into the street. The only place to swerve is into a few senior citizens. The kid's dead, right? Obviously the seniors have seniority, you must Respect Your Elders, and their estates can pay for much better attorneys that a grieving young couple can. I just wonder if the software will be smart enough to know that.
  - maxerickson 13y ago
    The network so awful it can't prevent fatal crashes on bridges but so awesome it can pick who dies when they happen.
- krapp 13y ago
  >all self driving cars will shut off whenever the chance of precip is above 0%, or the temp is below 32F, etc. No, they'll probably still work. You'll just have to pay a premium for driving in "unsafe conditions" and "unsafe areas."
loup-vaillant 13y ago
Something I don't get: what is assisted driving for? I can see it being used in a transition period, where we want to assess the reliability of computers, get a corpus… But once the car can drive itself, why not let it? That way, no matter how unreliable you are, it won't influence the car. Higher insurance rates will be only for people who insist on driving their cars. I believe this would be a very good thing.
- krapp 13y ago
  A system in which no one ever has any control over where their vehicles choose to take them is not necessarily benign. Such a system can be tampered with, taken over or simply glitch because some idiot caused an overflow or the maps are inaccurate or all of a sudden $something_inefficient. The purpose of 'assisted' driving lies in the premise that a 'perfectly' automated system doesn't exist, and will fail, and when it does, it should fail to wetware.
  - graylights 13y ago
    The notion of "control" is silly, you will still be the captain of the car, just not the driver. What if the wetware system kills 100 times as many people, should you still be able arbitrarily override the automated driver? I already accept a lot of places that I should let machines handle a task for me. I drive an automatic transmission rather then shift myself. I have traction control that overrides my foot to give me better control of the car. I fly in planes that are mostly flown by autopilot. Assisted driving will only be a short stopgap. It will be quickly gotten rid of because of cost to maintain two systems and because the ugliness of a "drivers seat". Interiors will look nothing like they do now. There will be no drive-shaft (fully electric) so no big bump or center console in middle of car. No steering column, no mirrors and a completely different arrangement of seats then now. In other words a fully automated car looks nothing like an assisted driving car. I doubt people are going to want to pay more and sit in less comfortable cabin, just for the opportunity to override the computer driver.
    - krapp 13y ago
huherto 13y ago
I would imagine that critical systems will be kept isolated from the rest of the systems.
- krapp 13y ago
  Also likely (based on actual trends), critical systems will be directly connected to the internet, and protected by a single company wide default password.

nyarlathotep 13y ago

This may interest you: http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf http://www.autosec.org/pubs/cars-usenixsec2011.pdf

stormbrew 13y ago

It's not as if it's particularly difficult to tamper with traffic flow now, as it stands. Take down a stop sign, mess with traffic light signalling (popular in movies about terrorist madmen), just plain go up to a car and hijack it. The crackdown on people doing this, however, is enormous. It makes it very unprofitable to do any of these things.

Brakenshire 13y ago

The potential for centralized surveillance and control which exists in all digital systems will become a more and more important issue as these devices progressively become ubiquitous. The same applies to driverless cars as to smartphones, electronic medical records, reading of news articles, social media, etc, etc.