Why Car Info Tech Is So Thoroughly At Risk

Cory Doctorow reflects in a post at Boing Boing on the many ways in which modern cars' security infrastructure is a white-hot mess. And as to the reasons why, this seems to be the heart of the matter, and it applies to much more than cars: [M]anufacturers often view bugs that aren't publicly understood as unimportant, because it costs something to patch those bugs, and nothing to ignore them, even if those bugs are exploited by bad guys, because the bad guys are going to do everything they can to keep the exploit secret so they can milk it for as long as possible, meaning that even if your car is crashed (or bank account is drained) by someone exploiting a bug that the manufacturer has been informed about, you may never know about it. There is a sociopathic economic rationality to silencing researchers who come forward with bugs.

Comments

Let's wait until al Quadia discovers it

[NotInHere]

and thousands of people die the same moment because some terrorist pressed a button. Of course, well informed, as the big data terrorist is, they will find out whether you are a muslim and your wife wears a burqua with even their ankle being covered all day, they will spare your car if you are one.

We only see risks where we've seen the risk actually causing harm. This is also a reason why its so hard to find motivation to fight against climate change.

Re:Let's wait until al Quadia discovers it

[TWX]

Just because they're the only ones that have done it, doesn't mean that interested parties wouldn't want themselves to do it.

Which is more terrifying, the enemy that personally attacks you, that you can boast and brag about fighting him before he kills you, or the enemy that kills you that you never had a chance of defending against?

Now, imagine that the Toyota unintended vehicle acceleration problem manifested on all of the vulnerable cars at the same time . There are a LOT of Toyotas out there, and as a global car make it would not be hard for an organization, anywhere in the world that wanted to try this, to get vehicles to use to test discovered exploits on.

Where is Commander Adama when we need him?

[dfn5]

Someone in the car industry needs to stand up and say "There will be no networked computers in my vehicles."

Re:Why car info tech is so thoroughly at risk ..

[Darinbob]

Disagree. Proprietary software is just as buggy and sometimes extremely buggy. There may even be NDA agreements that forbid revealing any bugs to third parties.

Not surprised at all

[wbr1]

At its core, capitalism, raw and unregulated is a sociopathic economic structure. That this manifests itself this way in the automobile industry is just one facet of it.

There are arguments that can be made that state the stakes are higher now (due to the interconnectedness of systems), and it is plain that the attack surface of just about anything is larger, but those still are symptoms, not causes.

On the flip side of that, those with power and money have amassed more, and that interconnectedness plays to their advantage, resulting in the psuedo-regulated oligarchy we see across most industries and governments today.

The invisible hand of the free market is a hand that will push all to wrack and ruin if allowed to be completely free.

Re:Not surprised at all

[circletimessquare]

capitalism works but it has to be heavily regulated

pushing against regulation by spewing propaganda for morons who buy simpleminded "logic" and then voting for the puppet, or corrupting regulation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... , this is how free markets die

a market is only free if it is heavily regulated. no regulation means the big guys abuse smaller players and consumers

the richest, happiest societies have low corruption and good social safety nets. anyone arguing against either is a propaganda victim who is arguing for their own impoverishment, unless they are a billionaire plutocrat

Re:Not surprised at all

[circletimessquare]

even regulatory capture is better than no regulation. the big guys corrupting the government and writing rules that help them, is still better than no rules at all, where the big guys simply crush smaller guys and consumers any fucking way they want: no regulation, remember?

plenty of countries handle regulation with far less corruption than us. that's what we should aim for. but asking for less regulation, is far worse, on any measure you can think of. you should be asking for regulations to be cleaned up

it's like the bad guys robbed the bank by paying off the guard

and your solution is:

1. fire the guard. no guard. hey, that will work to prevent bank robberies (!?)
2. forget the bad guys, don't even go after them or punish them

just let them get away with robbing you and not even mentioning them as the fucking cause of your problem. all you do is whine "the problem is we have guards who can be corrupted, you can never get rid of that problem..." hello? what about the assholes doing the corrupting and robbing you? do you have anything to say about their behavior?

what you should do is:

1. fire the guard. hire a new guard. evaluate him better and more regularly
2. go after the bad guys. punish them. make them pay. they fucking robbed you asshole

why do corporations escape scrutiny when they corrupt our government and so many morons can only criticize the government?

what the hell is up with that?

FIX the government. if you WEAKEN the government, the bad guys who are the actual cause of your fucking problem laugh all the way to the bank: you made their job easier, and rewarded them for fucking up the only thing you have to protect yourself, your fucking government

Re:Not surprised at all

[circletimessquare]

they need a basic education in economics, and some obvious history: the gilded ages of victorian times for example

only then should they be allowed to have an opinion

an uneducated, wish fulfillment fantasy that ignores basic economic facts is not a valid opinion

"markets regulate themselves, magic free market fairy solves all problems!" is a quasireligion, not an ideology or political concept anyone should respect

this crap is made for morons and suckers by plutocrat controlled propaganda sources

that being said, libertarianism, european style, is respectable: it's about social issues

only this mutant american-style "libertarianism," that only cares about economics and only motivates simple minded social retards to agitate for less regulation and taxes for the ultrarich, is invalid and contemptible

if you (not you, justanotheroldguy, anyone reading) agitate for legal marijuana, gays getting married, women controlling their own bodies, etc.: i consider you a libertarian, and i respect you

if you agitate for less regulation of multinational conglomerates, you're not a libertarian. you're a fucking moron being used as a useful tool by propaganda channels pushing your simpleton's easily identifiable prejudicial buttons. against your own well-being. because you're too fucking dumb to understand otherwise. and i have zero respect for you, and a good measure of disgust for polluting the political discourse in this country with useless low intelligence mental diarrhea that only helps the ultrarich and large corporations

Re:Also, who does not separate drive control?

[knorthern knight]

> You should read the articles. Because CAN is a multi-master communications
> bus any device on the bus has write access at the hardware level - it's only
> software controls that limit whether a device can write to the bus or not. Which
> is why the government-mandated ODBC-II interface is such a bad idea,
> because anyone can plug in to the CAN bus with a standardized connector
> and get complete control of a vehicle.

Why is so much unnecessary, security-risky, stuff connected to that device? In a worst case, have separate buses...
* the "entertainment" bus for wifi for "teh interweb", streaming audio, etc.
* the "critical" bus that controls car operation. Have it only *PHYSICALLY* accessable, i.e. only via physically plugging a probe into a jack. And none of the devices connected to the "critical" bus are radio/wifi/bluetooth/whatever-else externally accessable.

Re: same as it ever was

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey right wing dumbass.... Union people don't design the cars, nor do they decide to ignore problems with them.

As to insulation from competition: you mean like making sure that we didn't have a race to the bottom like we do now? Because 30 plus years of right wing economics have worked so well for everyone. Just look at how wages and productivity have gone up! Oh, wait. Productivity has gone through the roof and wages have gone nowhere.

Even the front runner in your own party gets that 'free trade' is a disaster you know. That the rest of the party establishment hates his guts is rather telling too.

Bugs should be costly to ignore, and cheap to fix

[QuietLagoon]

...M]anufacturers often view bugs that aren't publicly understood as unimportant, because it costs something to patch those bugs, and nothing to ignore them...

If it costs nothing to ignore security bugs that can cause car crashes and human injury, then clearly the cost of ignoring such bugs is far too low.

.
The question becomes, how can security bugs be made expensive to ignore and cheap to fix?

Re:Why car info tech is so thoroughly at risk ..

[Z00L00K]

NDAs in proprietary software is there for a reason - to protect the software vendor against revelations that they have done wrong, all the way from copyright infringement (like breaking an open source license condition in their solution), backdoors, security shortcuts etc. If it possibly can exist it will exist in the closed code.

As being involved in the car industry - I can agree upon the observation. Just look at the Autosar platform, it's a collection of bugs in tight formation that has been sold to the car industry as the greatest solution since the invention of the stone axe. But for everyone that have been working with internet solutions it's revealed to be a very clunky solution that doesn't really improve things, it just adds overhead.

Today the car industry starts to look at Ethernet as a replacement for CAN, but then there are complaints about it causing a higher power consumption and therefore there's a "need" to do quirky solutions like separating traffic on VLANs on the same physical bus, and that separation into VLANs is enough to offer sufficient security against intrusions and overload attacks (intentional through malware or unintentional through bugs).

In addition to this it's worth to realize that when you buy a car you only buy the hardware, you aren't permitted to know anything about the software. So essentially the manufacturer could say that you can keep the car but we have to erase the software in it - leaving you with a 2 ton shell of steel and plastics.