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Carmakers Oppose Opening Up 5GHZ Spectrum Space For Unlicensed Wi-Fi
s122604 writes "Automakers aren't too happy about a recent U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal, which uses part of the wireless spectrum assigned to vehicle-to-vehicle technology for Wi-Fi instead. The FCC announced that it plans to free up 195 MHz of spectrum in the 5 GHz band for unlicensed use in an effort to address the U.S.' spectrum crisis. This could potentially lead to Wi-Fi speeds faster than 1 gigabit per second."
Rootkits arent something that enable you to hack, and thats not how hacking works. Wireless systems can be made secure, you know, and we actually have a pretty good handle on it.
Only if they are firmware and you can't put a dongle device (which is under the steering column on most vehicles) or attach one to the internal system.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Wireless systems can be made secure, you know, and we actually have a pretty good handle on it.
Yes, a splendid trackrecord to boot as well...
Wireless systems can be made somewhat secure, never perfectly secure, and car companies are not exactly doing everything they can to make these systems even adequately secure. As it is most are very insecure and easily hacked.
My router at home does N speeds of 300 megs and is attached to 16 meg cable, Do I really NEED to connect to my router at over 1 gig speeds if the cable modem it's connected to is still linked to the same half arsed, capped cable?
I see a techy subject and read it instantly as Carmackers...
Bullshit. Those assholes won't have anything with any utility rolled out for another 10 years. We can use the wireless spectrum NOW.
Wireless radio systems have been around for about a century now, and Im not aware of anyone ever pulling off a hack of a car radio system or a radio tower through radio transmission. Just "being wireless" doesnt by itself make something vulnerable, just like just "being on the internet" doesnt make you vulnerable.
Its all about whats on the other end, and what it allows access to. Something with a lot of advanced features is going to be a lot harder to secure, while something that just tracks nearby vehicles could be remarkably easy to secure.
Why yes, WPA has a pretty darn decent track record (even using a known-deficient algorithm on the backend), while WPA2 is generally acknowledged to be "secure".
Wireless hacks occur 99% of the time on open or WEP access points, and the other 1% on WPA with a poor passphrase. I dont believe anyone has actually pulled off an in-the-wild non-bruteforce hack of WPA, let alone WPA2.
I'd rather have 1000 GBPS wireless for free than 10 GBPS wireless and stupid talking cars that anyone can hack if they have a decent rootkit, anyway.
Kitt; Micheal, you're going too fast.
Michael: Kitt, see this switch on your dashboard, it turns off your control of the accelerator.
1TBPS?? Just how fast do you need to share pictures of cats on facebook????
You don't own that spectrum. Corporations own that spectrum. Right now, lobbyists from the electronics industry are paying / bribing / offering more to the regulators than the car manufacturers are prepared to meet. Just like the commercial broadcast spectrum segments -- AM and FM radio, television -- of which you get to use precisely zero, this isn't about you -- it's about the manufacturers of devices that will use that spectrum.
The FCC's spectrum allocation arm allocates so little of the available spectrum to the public, and in particular, easily usable spectrum, that it is fairly painful to contemplate. The only people with a public voice are those with extremely deep pockets, and that's no accident.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Oh really? As secure as not having wireless access? It's not like a car absolutely needs this gimmickry..
and why would anyone want this? you do realize the rather large corporate/government monkey that will come with this, right?
Then you may need more speed. Your N gets you more like 100mbps effective data rate (test it some time) since the WiFi speeds are displayed raw and there's a lot of overhead. Now that is 100mbps shared among all devices. So, if you connect to your router and it to a wired computer, no problem full bandwidth. However if you connect to another computer on WiFi, oh look, you guys are sharing. Have a bunch of computers on all accessing, that bandwidth starts to get spread thin.
If all you do is one computer to the Internet, then you are fine, for now at least. Otherwise? Yes, more bandwidth is good.
"Wireless systems can be made secure, you know, and we actually have a pretty good handle on it."
Only for very limited definitions of "we."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
is gonna get anywhere anytime soon... it's nearly worthless until every car on the road has it.. which will take a LONG time.. even getting to something like 90%+ v2v-enabled will take decades.
The benefits start accruing once 10 percent of the vehicles on the road have it. You don't need 90%. You don't even need 30%.
As you rush headlong into a fogged in traffic jam, there is a good chance that at least one vehicle in that jam will this technology and warn your car well ahead of time, so you can slow down (also slowing those behind you). You don't need every car to have this. Similarly, in-road transmitters can warn just enough new cars of trouble ahead to slow an entire stream of traffic.
Sure, not ALL of the capabilities of V2V will be available immediately, but plenty of them will work even with a small percentage of participants.
That being said, development of these systems is far from complete, and shifting them to new frequencies is really a last minute decision. There is no real reason that 5GHZ is ideal for this V2V use, and something much higher up in the spectrum might actually work just as well, if not better.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
I'm one of those pinko liberal democrats. But where electromagnetic spectrum is concerned, I'm as mercenary as they come.
If car makers want spectrum, they can buy it just like everybody else. The FCC should put the entire radio spectrum up for sale to the highest bidder on a rotating 10-year cycle, nothing exempt except for a few bands set aside for emergency services, military, and scientific use.
FM radio, TV, taxicabs, ham radio, I don't care: if you want exclusive use of a slice of spectrum, you form a coalition of like-minded people willing to pay for it. If somebody else wants to pay more, go find a better business model.
I'm surprised that they aren't pulling out the "Interference" card.
Wireless radio systems have been around for about a century now, and Im not aware of anyone ever pulling off a hack of a car radio system or a radio tower through radio transmission.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9229919/Car_hacking_Remote_access_and_other_security_issues
http://www.caranddriver.com/features/can-your-car-be-hacked-feature
But you don't have to gain control of a car to do damage. If you can convince a V2V car that the 5 cars immediately ahead just came to a full stop because of a collision, you may be able to trick it into braking hard, causing a collision behind you.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Weird cos most mikrotik (and ubiquiti) gear should be able to use it with nothing but a firmware patch (actually no need to use a firmware patch just tick the box to disable regulatory restrictions but you run the risk of using other channels that aren't freed up yet)
Or you could learn to drive in fog and not out drive your vision.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Is it correct that the evil twin problem is unsolved for WPA2-Personal? Seems you can't prevent someone else from spoofing your SSID and harvesting the passphrase, unless you go to WPA2-Enterprise with Radius. Free Radius is available, but you need to run a little server in addition to your wireless router, I would guess. Maybe the extra hardware can double as a firewall?
Might I point out that WinXP was "generally acknowledged to be secure"? Actually, it was pretty secure, compared to what we had been used to prior to WinXP. WinXP SP3 improves a great deal over WinXP, and Win7 improved even more - which only helps to demonstrate that "security" is a moving target. "Generally acknowledged" means squat.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
But..but..Job Creators!
They oppose the public having any access to the spectrum for the same reason all the major corporate entities don't want you to have access to any nice things without they get get a nickel in they pocket for it.
They let the internet get away from them and they vowed to never let it happen again. In their minds, the internet should have been cable television on steroids, not some big open bazaar where people can post blogs calling them assholes. They got caught with their pants down on that one, and they'll be damned if they're going to let it happen again.
Oh, and eternal copyright. Because they can.
You are welcome on my lawn.
It does if they're going to know where you're at, where you shop, who you see and what you're doing. And so they can send you targeted ads telling you about "special deals" wherever you go.
You think you're car is going to have a "Do Not Track" switch on the dashboard?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Faster than Ford needs to know which stores I shop at.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This isn't for "vehicle-to-vehicle comms.
You are welcome on my lawn.
Uh, no. It's the public's spectrum. The FCC runs it for us, and leases it out to corporations, WHO PAY US for the right to use it.
A landlord might lease out a room, and under the terms of that lease may not be allowed to enter the room unannounced any more, but that doesn't mean the landlord is no longer the owner.
I think the future of radio transmission is moving away from "allocated frequencies" and towards direction sensing antennas, frequency hopping, error correction and traffic tagging. The reasons for this are multifold, but for starters having an agency say "nobody can use this frequency but Bob" doesn't stop Alice from using the frequency and crapflooding all over it. The law has provisions to stop Alice, but Bob is completely screwed while the law tracks down Alice and asks her to quit it.
Frequency hopping eases that for the source because it's much harder to jam. Interference still can happen but that's what the error correction is for, assuming non-intentional interference. Additionally, making the receive antenna directional makes an interfering source much harder to use because they've got to be on a similar angle to the receiver to screw things up.
In other words, the FCC is forcing people to keep up. First by telling TV stations to move, then by selling white space, now with this stuff. The slashdot post the other day about the UK looking to move radar out of 5Ghz and use passive radar is another example of changing the way radio is used. They aren't saying car makers can't use this, they're saying improve your systems to the point where everyone can use this without issue.
Of course it could still be about the money, since they originally sold the frequencies to automakers and now they're reselling it to wifi providers. I doubt auto makers are getting a refund.
I guess you didn't bother to RTFA, and I don't use Facefuck, Shitter, or any other 'social networking'
yeah, I read the fucking article, but actually know a little about the industry, instead of just trolling for page views.
wtf are 'page views' here, dimwit? OP doesnt look like he was trolling either, and you're probably a 16 year old kid in mom's basement. enlighten us oh wise one since you know so much about the fucking industry. ass.
Aahh... these crispy, eloquent comments is why I come to Slashdot.
The vast majority of spectrum is "reserved" (meaning reserved for government use or later sale). There shouldn't be "open" bands. There should be "closed" bands (say, some of the scientific bands, and a few for the mobile phones sold to guarantee quality), but the rest should be open. Anyone any reason, so long as it plays nicely with others.
Learn to love Alaska
You don't need RADIUS if you sign an AP cert and a user Cert, right?
Learn to love Alaska
I'd rather have 1000 GBPS wireless for free than 10 GBPS wireless and stupid talking cars that anyone can hack if they have a decent rootkit, anyway.
Kitt; Micheal, you're going too fast.
Michael: Kitt, see this switch on your dashboard, it turns off your control of the accelerator.
If it talks, then, it can listen, so, who else can listen?
The mind conceives, the body achieves, the spirit manifests.
I don't suppose you can give a single example of an auto or planned product that's actually using this spectrum? The auto makers are opposing it simply because they want to hang onto the spectrum.
It's not like a car absolutely needs antilock brakes, or seatbelts, or traction control, or a backup camera either. But driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do each week, and tech that can make it safer is a good plan..
We're very close now to freeway lanes with self-driving cars talking to one another making your freeway drive for you. My car does a pretty good job of knowing where the lanes are, and where the other cars nearby are, though cameras and radar, but it's not there yet. I've seen a Google self-driving car on the road, but the tall camera mast on the thing isn't going to work for most people. We need car-to-car comms for the compuets to chat with one another to do this right.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
> so long as it plays nicely with others
Ah, that's the rub, though. You'd still need some regulation and certified, per-manufactured units that were sealed against tampering. If you're suggesting that we just throw a giant chunk of spectrum out for people to do with as they please, it will be unusable within a year or two from all the interference. Even worse, it will be interfering with other services, including some of MY licensed ones. :)
Naturally, I object to that.
You want some math? Bozo The Redneck has a 5GHz unit that he has "improved." To get away from all of his neighbors' emissions, he found a little screw inside that would lower his frequency to 4.5GHz. Hey, there wasn't anyone else there! He then discovered that it would "put out more better" if he removed that silver can on the output (i.e., the filter). Harmonics are simply multiples of the fundamental frequency, so now he's radiating junk at 9GHz, 13.5GHz, and 18GHz. This doesn't even include the *spurious* products that he's generating at heaven-only-knows what frequencies, because he also goosed the power, so now the amplifier is clipping like mad. :)
That's when I perk up and take notice, because I have a licensed Dragonwave link at 18GHz that we absolutely depend on. It ferries (via audio-over-IP, as well as one T1-over-IP that was a BEAST to set up, but that's a separate story!) several signals for our radio stations, as well as telemetry and video monitoring (to watch for the @#$@#$ copper thieves). We kind of depend on that thing, y'know?
And if you think that's an unlikely scenario, think back to the CB craze of the late 70's. Most truck stops sold linear amplifiers. Highly illegal, but that didn't stop people from buying them. Better yet, the bozos had no idea how to tune them, so they radiated trash and harmonics that absolutely destroyed TV reception in rural areas, where people had to depend on over-the-air antennas -- i.e., the very areas that were most likely to have rednecks running "LEE-nyers." It was a very real problem, and the FCC (the CB's called him "uncle Charlie") was constantly running around, busting people for running these pieces of junk.
Just turning frequencies over to the public sounds like a good idea, but most people don't know what they're doing. As someone who loves Open Source and Open Standards and all that, it grieves me to say it, but in this particular case, you'd better have some oversight and control.
If you don't, the end result is going to be that everyone interferes with everyone else and NO ONE will be able to communicate. Read up on the history of the FCC sometime: it was actually created (at least in part) at the request of *broadcasters,* who were sick and tired of constant interference, scrambling for "open" frequencies and no real limits on operation.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
This. A thousand times this. Repeat for what passes for our whole society, by the way. Corporations bribe, take, and lie their way to finite resources while the people who own those resources get nothing. Spectrum, minerals, "intellectual property", it makes no difference.
The one thing they really fear, of course, is people communicating. Look at the attempts to turn the Internet into cable TV. Look at the kind of crime it was to own a fax machine in the Soviet Union, or a printing press in countless societies. The thing is, those things certainly aren't infinite but they're not particularly scarce either. Useful spectrum is limited, and it's not easy to get back once given away (it should never be sold, only leased if at all). Lack of useful spectrum makes it harder for people to communicate and, in particular, to communicate without "permission". Free association and free exchange of thoughts and ideas is not good for statist control freaks or their corporate masters.
Car to car transmissions are actually a secret plan to send all location data to Ford over a non-existent car-mesh-malware network. Got it. Do you wrap your car in a tinfoil hat?
Learn to love Alaska
If you're suggesting that we just throw a giant chunk of spectrum out for people to do with as they please, it will be unusable within a year or two from all the interference. Even worse, it will be interfering with other services, including some of MY licensed ones. :)
We've done that with 2.4 and 5 GHz, and it didn't work out the way you describe. Since reality has proven you wrong, I shouldn't have to take the time to do so. Also, 2.4 GHz had very poor rules on playing nice. Improved play-nice rules, and we'd get much more utility on an already useful range.
Learn to love Alaska
You still need a radius server, some routers have a built in radius server that you can provide the certs to to make it seem like you dont need one. however what is this "evil twin" attack that lets you harvest passphrases? The only attacks I'm aware of that involve an evil twin involve setting up a clone with the same ssid without encryption that pop up a captive portal when you try to browse the web and request the passphrase... ie social engineering there is no inherent weakness in wpa or wpa2 involving an evil twin afaik
While you don't need a permit to transmit on 2.4 and 5 GHz bands, there are very strict requirements on the radio transmitters and receivers operating there. It's not turned over to the public completely, which is probably what parent meant.
Yeah, so? It worked for ISM, but if we expand that idea to other ranges, it'll immediately collapse? You lost me there. The fact that it works is proof that it wouldn't.
Learn to love Alaska
That's good to know. I assumed that since the client can't distinguish the real router form the fake, it would respond to a password challenge with the password response, and that the response could be demunged to the cleartext, in WPA2-Personal. Glad to know if that's not true.
Funny, I haven't gotten any checks from the FCC recently...or, you know, ever.
This isn't for "vehicle-to-vehicle comms.
"Automakers aren't too happy about a recent U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) proposal, which uses part of the wireless spectrum assigned to vehicle-to-vehicle technology for Wi-Fi instead."
RTFS
I dont believe wpa keys are done as just passwords, its more like the router says "solve the equation using this number i just gave you along with the key you already know" if your client cant provide the correct response then it doesn't allow it on, since the router rotates the number it provides and the equation is done in a complex and unidirectional manner it can't be reversed easily. Hence why people use rainbow tables to crack weaker keys. There are some weaknesses in the TKIP protocol used by wpa but wpa2 depreciates that and replaces it with a newer AES setup that is more secure in that regards and TKIP is done after the initial authentication.
The problem with this article is people have no idea why the car manufacturers are upset, all they see is some big corporation opposing the release of more unlicensed public spectrum (and some sensationalist WIFI BS by bloggers). Or course this draws out the communists among us that want all corporations to go away.
This all fails to miss the entire point of why the Auto companies are opposing this. This spectrum is directly adjacent to spectrum allocated for intercar communication. What is intercar communication? It's spectrum that was allocated a number of years ago to allow direct communication between vehicles. What is the point of that? Well one of the key aspects of this spectrum is that without it you don't have reliable inter-car communication which will greatly hamper self driving cars.
See, if you are going to have self driving cars those cars need to be able to communicate with each other, they need to tell the cars around them that they need to change lanes, or that they are breaking. The holy grail of self driving cars is a situation where cars are driving 70MPH with about 2 feet between them. This will greatly increase the density of cars and allow the freeways to operate about 200% more efficiently than now. But for that all to work that cars have to tell each other what they are doing so the other vehicles can react. Even with no perception-reaction time for computers you will greatly decrease the possible efficiency if the cars can't communicate real time. The only way to make this safe is dedicated spectrum with low interference.
If we have thousands of WIFI signals in adjacent spectrum there will be so much interference that the systems won't be reliable, the result will either be safety problems or drastically reduced efficiency. Self driving cars are a holy grail of ITS (intelligent transportation systems) that has been being pursued since the early 90's. It will result in freeways that are so much more efficient than today that you could fit 3-4 times the number of cars in the same freeway without any slow downs or rush hour traffic jams. Not only that but you could read a book while driving to work.
We don't want to impede or endanger self driving cars. The car manufacturers concerns about interference need to be taken seriously.
They want to implement their harebrained scheme, where cars communicate with each other to facilitate self driving cars in the future. Computers on the net, controlling cars is one of the most crazy ideas that anybody has come up with lately. Instead of hackers and criminals crashing computers only, they will crash car computers which will crash cars injuring and possibly killing people. If Microsoft has anything to say about this, they will insist that such vehicles run Windows.
Has there ever been a “secure” computer system? If a computer is on the net, it can be accessed and compromised, if there is an incentive to do so. I can just imagine some enterprising kid turning off the engines of vehicles traveling down the highway going past his house. Suddenly jamming on the brakes or running them off the road should be kinda fun also. If computer controlled cars should become the norm, I will have to drive my now 7-year-old car until the wheels fall off. I certainly won't buy such a hackable contraption.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
It's not like a car absolutely needs antilock brakes, or seatbelts, or traction control, or a backup camera either. But driving is the most dangerous thing most of us do each week, and tech that can make it safer is a good plan..
We're very close now to freeway lanes with self-driving cars talking to one another making your freeway drive for you. My car does a pretty good job of knowing where the lanes are, and where the other cars nearby are, though cameras and radar, but it's not there yet. I've seen a Google self-driving car on the road, but the tall camera mast on the thing isn't going to work for most people. We need car-to-car comms for the compuets to chat with one another to do this right.
Except that antilock brakes, seatbelts, traction control etc. don't provide external access to their controllers. Any time such access is provided by a network connection, hacking the control system remotely becomes possible. Self driving cars is a neat idea, but not at the expense of safety. If car control systems are externally accessible, they WILL be compromised.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
This sounds exactly like every redneck I've known.
Talk your ear off for hours about the advantages of different kinds of notch filters.
You get them indirectly, from the IRS. Don't like it? Lobby for higher taxes.
the "oh just use wireless" mentality really bugs me.
Let me quote an aphorism launched by a well-known personality about 4 years ago:
Everything is better with bluetooth
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
Dunno. My car's got a pretty advanced early warning system that uses some fairly high-frequency wavelengths, namely the visible portion of the spectrum.
Random traffic jams are only an issue when jackasses are following too closely in the first place, and not paying attention in the second.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Besides I highly do not like the idea at all of designing systems that would involve car to car systems in the first place.
Mostly due to privacy, because I just know the morons will put identifiers into each car, and just the simple fact a bored teenager with simple computer and electronics skills would have a hayday messing with people for fun. Anything else like transmitting say diagnostics info for service, etc would not need it's own private spectrum anyway.
> It's not turned over to the public completely, which is probably what parent meant.
That is EXACTLY what I meant. And just for the record, there probably won't be "a screw" that Bozo can adjust. (Everything is synthesized now.) But he'll find a way. (Most likely, someone will come out with a downloadable software "mod.")
Back during the CB era, most of the better radios could easily be modified to operate on those illegal frequencies, above and below 27MHz. You could even order kits and install them. Came with easy-to-follow instructions "for educational purposes only!" (Heh.)
The point is: this is just classic idealism: "Give it to the people and trust them!" Sounds good. Makes a great slogan on a T-shirt.
Problem is, it didn't work before (see my comment on HOW the FCC came into existence) and it won't work now.
I hate government regulation AND I hate big business (I'm an equal-opportunity curmudgeon), but there are times when some control and oversight is needed. We can argue about alternative methods for assigning frequencies, maybe even putting some of this allocation stuff up for a public vote, but it has to be controlled.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
> We've done that with 2.4 and 5 GHz, and it didn't work out the way you describe
Heh. You have obviously never used wireless in an apartment complex, or in a large building with several businesses, or even in a hotel "cluster" on the Interstate where dozens of different access points are fighting with one another for attention.
Our first data link, installed several years ago, was an unlicensed Motorola Canopy. Highly directional, 2.4GHz, worked like a charm ... until the folks who lived in the apartment complex right between our studios and transmitter site all bought Linksys and DLink access points. Not only were they arguing with each other about channels, they rendered that Motorola useless.
Fine; it was unlicensed. We couldn't complain. We knew the risk when we bought it.
But that's why we upgraded to the Dragonwave with a license. If anyone interferes with that, we can take positive action with the FCC to get them shut down or fixed.
Cogito, igitur comedam pizza.
I don't get it. What is so hard about designing these systems as Ad-hoc Wifi instead of whatever method they're currently using?
SJW: a person who perceives an injustice, and while correcting it, commits a greater injustice.
I have no problem declaring (out of blissfull ignorance) any reason one invents whereby they think 5ghz vechicle to vechicle communication is a good idea is actually not such a great idea upon closer inspection.
Hopefully with more spectrum in 5ghz ISM FCC also plans to allow higher transmitting power so it can be practically utilized.
Yes, but in WPA2-Personal, how can the client distinguish the router from it's evil twin? If the evil twin router issues a challenge, it can probably decode the response. All the client knows to do is send the password encoded to meet the challenge. With WPA2-Enterpise the client keeps track of the router's SSL public key, so can verify the challenge is valid. The evil twin cannot send a valid challenge because it does not have the real router's private key (provided by Radius). That's how I understand it. Or "guess-understand" it! I would like to be wrong.
There a pretty simple Free Radius setup tutorial here: http://kirkkosinski.com/2012/10/securing-wi-fi-with-peap-and-freeradius-on-centos/ So I guess it just requires a hardware server and making sure your router has decent firmware to connect.
If car control systems are externally accessible, they WILL be compromised.
Why is that any kind of special threat? If an attacker wants to wreck a bunch of cars on the freeway that is already quite easy to do: so easy that it happens by accident all the time. In fact, the word "accident" with no context has come to mean just that sort of thing in conversation.
The risk of normal freeway driving is the most dangerous thing we do every day. Some far-fetched movie plot risk of someone hacking car safety systems is trivial by comparison.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
Problem is, it didn't work before
So you are saying that 2.4 GHz is unusable. Reality proves you wrong. I still don't get what you are saying. You objected to my " open [them to] Anyone [for] any reason, so long as it plays nicely with others." which is exactly what existing ISM is, and ISM works pretty well, far better than you assert it "would" if it existed.
From how I read it, either you are the most disagreeable person to agree with me ever, or you are arguing that reality is wrong because you find it contradictory to your personal opinion. Please help me understand, without unrelated references to the CB era that pre-dates 90% of the people here.
Learn to love Alaska
Think about what a bad idea "car-to-car" transmissions really are. If the plan is to prevent collisions say, or to manage traffic, why would you want to cars talking to each other? How do you know the wi-fi transponders on the vehicles around you are in good working order, and secure, etc?
Wouldn't it be better to have cars treat each other as hostile and each vehicle with its own collision-avoidance system?
Do you trust every wi-fi transmission around you as secure? Do you trust your carmaker that much?
And why should carmakers be the ones to implement such a system? Wouldn't it be better to have an open standard and have companies compete to see who can come up with the best collision-avoidance system? Don't you believe in the free market? The idea is to have less market integration, not more (if you believe in free markets, at least).
Would you expect carmakers to be in charge of the GPS systems, too? Should carmakers be in charge of the AM, FM and satellite radio spectra because there are radios in cars?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Yeah, there's about one hundred vehicles in Ann Arbor right now running a multi-manufacturer pilot test of the car-to-car communications. Many of the cars have warning systems that use the info passed between cars to alert driver of a danger. This is useful whether or not we end up with self-driving cars. So, yes, both manufacturers the DOTs around the world want to hang onto the spectrum. It could help save lives, improve traffic flow and road utilization, and give manufacturers a set of new features they can sell to improve their profits. How horrible!
We can debate if this is the best use of spectrum. I think it is a pretty good use, and it will need to be protected and used in a coordinated way to make these vehicle applications feasible and effective. Maybe you'd rather have faster Facebook updates or see better video on demand on your smartphone or something? Would you think that's a lot more important than avoiding a massive pile up in a white-out snowstorm or fog? Manufacturers won't announce dates or specific models yet, but it could be fairly close. But it won't happen if poor spectrum management makes it technically infeasible.
Yeah, there's about one hundred vehicles in Ann Arbor right now running a multi-manufacturer pilot test of the car-to-car communications. Many of the cars have warning systems that use the info passed between cars to alert driver of a danger. This is useful whether or not we end up with self-driving cars. So, yes, both manufacturers the DOTs around the world want to hang onto the spectrum. It could help save lives, improve traffic flow and road utilization, and give manufacturers a set of new features they can sell to improve their profits. How horrible!
We can debate if this is the best use of spectrum. I think it is a pretty good use, and it will need to be protected and used in a coordinated way to make these vehicle applications feasible and effective. Maybe you'd rather have faster Facebook updates or see better video on demand on your smartphone or something? Would you think that's a lot more important than avoiding a massive pile up in a white-out snowstorm or fog? Manufacturers won't announce dates or specific models yet, but it could be fairly close. But it won't happen if poor spectrum management makes it technically infeasible.
Interesting. The big question isn't really whether it's an appropriate use of the spectrum, but perhaps whether they really needs such a large chunk of the spectrum. There is already 555 MHz allocated for this general use band, so this represents 1/3 of the current bandwidth. Note that this is larger than the band allocated for 5GHZ 802.11 right now. This change is to shrink this very underused band and allow it to be used more productively. So products may be affected, but they won't get shutdown entirely. "Private Land Mobile" has multiple chunks allocated in the FCC spectrum, that do not have corresponding allocations in the intentional table so it would be stupid for auto makers to use those frequencies anyway.
Think about what a bad idea "car-to-car" transmissions really are. If the plan is to prevent collisions say, or to manage traffic, why would you want to cars talking to each other? How do you know the wi-fi transponders on the vehicles around you are in good working order, and secure, etc?
Why would the cars talk to each other? Well, obviously if you can't think of a good reason, then there can't be one. You are smarter than every automoteive engineer on the planet combined. Or, maybe there are some good technical reasons. How do you know the car in front of you is slowing? You see the brake lights, and eventually see a slowing of the car. If everyone used RADAR, then the RADAR frequencies would be crowded, and that still doesn't affect your complaints about security (someone could set up a jammer that responded to any RADAR query with a response that indicated the car was standing still).
So, do you want the delay while object recognition tries to figure out if it's a reflection or brake lights? Or would you prefer that cars exchange certificates with each other as they get close and transmit telemetry of that which is safety affecting (indicators, brake pressure, speed, wheel position, etc.)? When someone indicates they are slowing with a signed transmission, that's more secure than any other automatic response implemented to date.
That you have objections to the idea doesn't mean you have to deliberately misinterpret the use to make it sound worse than it is.
Learn to love Alaska
So we need to give the auto manufacturers a chunk of public spectrum based on a technology that doesn't exist, and would only work if every vehicle on the road complied?
You still haven't answered why it should be car manufacturers who should be the ones in charge of this.
Since when do we put this handful of corporations in charge of public safety? Why not just turn over the roads to their ownership too? Then they could really make them safe.
You are welcome on my lawn.
So we need to give the auto manufacturers a chunk of public spectrum based on a technology that doesn't exist, and would only work if every vehicle on the road complied?
It would work just fine with no compliant cars, as it would fall back on visual recognition and such. But "optimal" case lets the last car in a string of 100 know the first car is slowing before the driver of the second car is aware. Many (nearly all) rush-hour crashes are nose-to-tail of people in the middle of a chain where the first person stopped suddenly, where the person who "caused" the crash never even knows there was a crash, let alone that they caused it. Meshed secure wireless transmits information much faster than without.
You still haven't answered why it should be car manufacturers who should be the ones in charge of this.
I'm sorry if I didn't address all your points in the order you requested. You can take it out of my pay.
You are right. They should leave the safety to the aftermarket. When side-impact beams were the hot item, you couldn't get in to even get an oil change for all the side-impact beams being retrofit into older cars. And when airbags were "forced" in 1987, independent shops everywhere made a mint installing 3rd party airbags for all the older cars.
Or could it be that if safety isn't "required" in new cars, not only is it not adopted, but it's nearly impossible to get, no matter how much you paid for it? I know that when I had an issue with trying to fit seatbelts into a 1967 car that came without them, I could only find things online through speciality shops, and safety items were nearly impossible to get otherwise (unless I wanted to replace the seats with Recaro or the like and fit a 5-point belt).
Since when do we put this handful of corporations in charge of public safety?
Name a safety item for cars that wasn't forced on us by the auto makers (usually after it was forced on them by law).
Why not just turn over the roads to their ownership too? Then they could really make them safe.
Nah, the safest thing to do is to close all the roads. Close them to all but government traffic, and you'd see bus ridership increase, at least in areas where the busses are run by the government. That'd make them safe.
Learn to love Alaska
The big difference is that an attacker in China cannot cause havoc on an American highway. The inconvenient truth is that anything on a network can be compromised. I have no problem with a robotic driver controlling the car if it can do so safely with the same information that a human driver uses to do that same job. Human drivers do not have their brains networked to each other. Why should the brain of a car driving robot be networked to the brain of another car driving robot? Is such a car driving robot depends on GPS information to keep the car functioning safely, that could be another safety hazard. There are places where GPS information is not available (tunnels) and such GPS data can be spoofed by an attacker. Human drivers do not need GPS information either to safely operate an automobile.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
In WPA-Personal (PSK) mode, the password is a shared secret, meaning that it is never passed over the air. Instead, authenticity is established by successful decryption: if I can use the password to decrypt a message I received from you, then I know that you knew the password when you encrypted it.
Technically, the password itself is not used as the key directly. It is repeatedly hashed with the SSID as a salt value to determine the pairwise master key (PMK) which is the actual encryption/decryption key. Since that key is a password equivalent (knowing it is as good as knowing the password), it is only used for the handshake process, which establishes two other keys, the PTK (pairwise transient key, used for unicast traffic) and the GTK (groupwise transient key, used for broadcast traffic), and those keys have no relation to the password.
The passphrase isnt sent cleartext. With PSK-based schemes, if the other party doesnt have the key, he simply cant read the data you send.
This isnt authentication as in the AP says "whats the code", its encryption where your laptop spews out encrypted data and if the other end cant read it, oh well.
Let me rephrase that. Basically all cryptography experts everywhere agree that so long as the key is kept secret (a big caveat), WPA2+AES is secure, as in "youre not cracking a key without quite a large amount of computational effort".
Youre assuming these systems use routable IPs. There is no reason to think that is the case; cars could simply form ad-hoc networks with non-routable addresses. Theres no reason to even think theyd use ethernet.
There is a big catch with ISM bands. Interference is YOUR problem. So when a teleco wanted to not use anything but ISM (in canada IIRC) it was ruled that they could not because they cannot give assurances about the QoS.
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
Do you think that a do not track switch would do anything if there was one?
The Grey Goo disaster happened 3 billion years ago. This rock is covered in self replicating machines!
In the US, they didn't ban telcos from using it, but none did for the reason you mention. But locking down over 99% of usable spectrum to defend the business cases for private companies doesn't seem to be the best use to me.
Learn to love Alaska
There are many more practical ways for "an attacker in China" to cause havoc without conjuring up absurd movie-plot threats.
Human drivers do not have their brains networked to each other. Why should the brain of a car driving robot be networked to the brain of another car driving robot?
Because the entire point of the excercise is for the robot driver to do a better job than a human.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
We've got a limited resource (the electromagnetic spectrum). The market-based thing to do is to auction off chunks of it for as much as the market can bear. Given that unlimited use becomes essentially impossible when people are too close together, and hence interfering with each other, I don't have a better idea.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Google has already demonstrated that robotic cars are quite capable of navigating on normal roads, without a network to other cars. Why make something more complicated than it needs to be? Other things being equal, a networked car will always be more vulnerable to attack than one that does not need an external wireless connection.
A sufficiently advanced simulation is indistinguishable from reality.
Have you actually seen the Google car? The whole hting is an excercise in being more complicated than it needs to be (not knocking it, it is 1.0 after all).
Other things being equal, a networked car will always be more vulnerable to attack than one that does not need an external wireless connection.
What is with all the luddites on Slashdot? Of course it will be, all new technology brings new risks. Stop being afraid of everything in the world and enjoy a better life.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The evil twin can't decode the response. It doesn't have the shared secret. The challenge response mechanism in wpa doesn't transmit the key over the air, it uses it to encode/decode a response message.