Slashdot Mirror
Hackers Reveal Nasty New Car Attacks
schwit1 writes "Stomping on the brakes of a 3,500-pound Ford Escape that refuses to stop–or even slow down–produces a unique feeling of anxiety. In this case it also produces a deep groaning sound, like an angry water buffalo bellowing somewhere under the SUV's chassis. The more I pound the pedal, the louder the groan gets–along with the delighted cackling of the two hackers sitting behind me in the backseat. Luckily, all of this is happening at less than 5mph. So the Escape merely plows into a stand of 6-foot-high weeds growing in the abandoned parking lot of a South Bend, Ind. strip mall that Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have chosen as the testing grounds for the day's experiments, a few of which are shown in the video below. (When Miller discovered the brake-disabling trick, he wasn't so lucky: The soccer-mom mobile barreled through his garage, crushing his lawn mower and inflicting $150 worth of damage to the rear wall.) The duo plans to release their findings and the attack software they developed at the hacker conference Defcon in Las Vegas next month–the better, they say, to help other researchers find and fix the auto industry's security problems before malicious hackers get under the hoods of unsuspecting drivers."
The mere fact that this has been announced has already started the wrong people working on it. At this point, releasing at Def-Con is the right thing to do, because not only will that patch get fixed, but others will come to similar conclusions and keep an eye out for peers who are going to exploit this. Black hats have family too.
Here's to hot beer, cold women, and Glaswegian kisses for all.
You mean like if there was some embedded computer plugged into the same CANbus as the OBD port, that had a cellular radio on it that was already shown to be vulnerable to attack? One sold on every new car from a certain major manufacturer?
Yeah, in the future, when OnStar exists, there will be serious issues. Wait, was "future" the right word?
The underlying problem is that CANbus was designed by automotive engineers and not network security people.
Honda and Accura nav systems are also apparently hooking into the OBD port. They report codes on the nav screen, can't (or won't) clear them.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
As for me, I'm going to stick to buying cars in which the brake master cylinder is physically depressed by the pedal, and in which the emergency brake lever is physically connected with a mechanical cable....
I drove a rental car the other day with an electronic emergency brake. I've never been more uncomfortable driving a vehicle. Besides having "safety" features that made it really clumsy to drive (you can't release the emergency brake unless your foot is on the brake pedal, for example, which doesn't make any real sense if the vehicle is in a flat parking space, with the transmission in Park), I just can't see myself ever trusting a car in which a computer failure could kill the emergency brake entirely, and in which there's no way to apply more force on the emergency brake in the event of an actual emergency. That design pretty much defeats the whole purpose of having an emergency brake.
Ugh.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Apparently in their test case, the telematics unit did have access to all 3 speeds of network. That's really goofy since it shouldn't need access to all the networks. Basically CAN buses have 3 speeds of network, a low, medium and high speed network with different types of data on each. TPMS for example is generally low, ABS is normally high speed and your typical error codes and car locks and a lot of the status reporting is on the medium speed. Many ODBII connectors won't connect to multiple of the networks unless you get more expensive units and internally not all components in the vehicle are capable of talking on all of the networks.
AJ Henderson