Unpatchable 'Flaw' Affects Most of Today's Modern Cars (bleepingcomputer.com)

Catalin Cimpanu, writing for BleepingComputer: A flaw buried deep in the hearts of all modern cars allows an attacker with local or even remote access to a vehicle to shut down various components, including safety systems such as airbags, brakes, parking sensors, and others. The vulnerability affects the CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol that's deployed in modern cars and used to manage communications between a vehicle's internal components. The flaw was discovered by a collaborative effort of Politecnico di Milano, Linklayer Labs, and Trend Micro's Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team. Researchers say this flaw is not a vulnerability in the classic meaning of the word. This is because the flaw is more of a CAN standard design choice that makes it unpatchable.

Comments

Exploit requires access

[klossner]

To perform this DOS attack, you must have a device physically connected to the CAN bus. If an attacker has that kind of access to your car, a DOS attack is not your biggest problem. The attacker could just as easily pump 120 volts into the bus and fry every component. Or leave a time bomb on the driver's seat.

okay

[ArylAkamov]

This is nothing new, anyone who has developed a CAN device before knows this, no "shocking new research" needed. It was never designed to be secure, it was designed to be extremely resistant to noisy environments, and does a damn good job at it.
tl;dr if you are a political target, get an older car without an electric throttle body and electric power steering bullshit.

Oh enough of this shit

[Anonymous Coward]

I am so sick of infosec nerds thinking they know more than the engineers at Ford, BMW, etc. About building cars. Coming up with new "vulnerabilities" - "I just need physical access to the car's OBD-II port with a laptop". Stick to Flintstones cars if you feel so insecure, the rest of us will drive fearlessly in luxury.

Re:Oh enough of this shit

[DarkOx]

So I am one of those infosec guys and we have been doing CAN bus assessments for the big 3 for some time now. This has to be the stupidest article I have read in some time.

First off the next gen cars are already implementing 'segmented' CAN buses with a firewall module that allows some devices to send white listed messages from the less privileged body areas to the more privileged engine management and safety buses. So this problem is already being solved.

Very few existing cars have a path to remotely introduce CAN messages. Some do but those interfaces have by and large been hardened pretty well, the Jeep stuff from some years ago is long fixed.

So what have here is basically if you are in the car you can do bad stuff by wiring into the can bus. Okay I make the airbag fail too buy yanking it out of the dash board, who cares.