Hack Your Ignition (Before Someone Else Does)

guanxi writes: "IEEE Spectrum has an interesting article about hacking and specifically, the "hacker's nirvana on wheels", all the way from hot-rodding to reprogramming your digital ignition. Of course, I neither endorse nor recommend any of the procedures mentioned, any of which may be inherently dangerous to your life and your warranty. "

Comments

Tune with care

[klui]

One of the problems with tuners is that they add more power without accounting for aging of components. This isn't usually a problem in racing since you're rebuilding your components after every or a number of races. But for "hackers," they often tune it and forget it--or tune it and increase the mods. Sometime down the road, they'll blow a piston or apex seal without warning. Not to mention several thousand dollars' down the drain.

I personally prefer more conservative tuning, but then when some guy beats you during an ad-hoc "race," your first instinct is "gotta get mo' power."

A question

[sllort]

Reverse-engineering is fun. Reverse-engineering embedded systems is even more fun, because it's hard. Reverse-engineering safety-critical embedded systems is really challenging, and not for the stupid.

Now, what the author is talking about is reverse-engineering the systems that control AntiLock braking, ignition, and transmission control, among other things. It's a really cheap way to improve performance on a car.

Car companies (well, at least Ford) have a bad history when it comes to electronic civil liberties. At what point in reverse-engineering a throttle control system would you be "bypassing an access protection device"? Probably never. But consider that Adobe got someone jailed for breaking ROT13; Cuecat was XOR. If people start selling hot-rod software (and they are), how long will it be till auto manufacturers start answering Yes to the author's "is it encrypted" question. It might only be ROT13, but it would be enough to bust anyone who was selling firmware upgrades for a Mustang and put them out of business for good.

Anyone remember the 60 minutes Audi 5000 scandal? Where the car's fuel injection system was said to, in rare cases, cause the car to accelerate out of control, causing injury or death? Let your subconcious do the dreaming about the accidents that could come from improperly debugged ABS code or throttle control. Now imagine that someone hacks their car's firmware, crashes in a fireball, and their family sues the automaker. The automaker can't prove that the car was modified... at all.

My prediction: this stuff will scare automakers shitless, and they will fall all overthemselves to find a way to apply the DMCA to stopping the dissemination of reverse-engineering information.

Of course, I could be wrong.

Re:Hmm..

[John_Booty]

The car manufacturers have another very good reason for keeping the electonics systems relatively simple- so they WORK BETTER. Each flaw costs them millions of dollars in recalls or warrantied repairs. The less extraneous shit they cram into the electronics, the less is likely to go wrong.

Maybe commerical software engineers will realize this, some day? ;-)