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Tesla Will Open Its Security Code To Other Car Manufacturers (engadget.com)
Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced he would share the source code for Tesla's car security software with other manufacturers, adding that it would be "extremely important" to ensure the safety of future self-driving cars. Engadget reports: Musk didn't provide a timeline for availability, and you might not want to get your hopes up when it took years for Tesla just to post any source code. And this isn't strictly a selfless gesture. If rival brands adopt Tesla's approach, it could set an unofficial standard for connected car security that would look good from a marketing standpoint. The code could provide a boost to connected car security if and when it arrives. There are few common frameworks (technical or legal) for safeguarding networked vehicles, and security might not always be a top priority. This could give companies a baseline level of security that would save brands the trouble of developing an effective defense from scratch.
Toyota has hundreds of security engineers and produces about 9 million cars per year. That's about 11% of total auto production.
Tesla produces about 100,000 vehicles, or 1% of what Toyota produces. It's going to be tough for a tiny boutique operation to even *influence* the standards uses by the auto industry, much less *set* the standards. It's like me and my company trying to set the standard for HTTP authentication. Our comments were read by some of the significant players who have some actual say in what standards are adopted, but organizations such as Netscape, Microsoft, and Apache designed and selected the standards.
A more realistic goal for Tesla might be to have a voice so that standards adopted by the industry don't completely screw them. Since Tesla is 0.11% of the auto industry, statistical noise, the industry as a whole doesn't care what they do. VW, which produces a hundred times as many vehicles, actually affects the industry.
Toyota has hundreds of security engineers and produces about 9 million cars per year.
Security concerns around self driving cars are many orders of magnitude more critical than anything traditional auto makers have to deal with.
What is the most complex thing todays auto makers have to worry about? Pretty much it's wired input for gas and brake, that's about it... oh maybe something as important as On-Star's ability to stop a car running.
All of that stuff is nothing compared to a self-driving car that is not just directing speed but also direction.
I wrote elsewhere I'm not sure what Tesla has to offer will be taken in by other auto makers and probably wouldn't be of use to them. However I do think Tesla is vastly ahead of other car makers in terms of practical self-driving car software, both because the not-quite-self-driving car Autopilot feature has been in production for some time, and because of the vast quantity of sensor data Tesla has around to process and try new systems against.
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Good job to Tesla for announcing that they're planning on open sourcing their code! This can't be anything but good news for the auto industry. There's a lot of people that are worried about their autonomous cars getting hacked, this will provide a good baseline of security.
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