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.

Comments

Interesting but not sure how valuable

[SuperKendall]

I can't see many if any other automakers taking in code Tesla has produced, pretty sure most would prefer to go their own way... I am also pretty dubious if they did, that it would provide much marketing benefit to Tesla.

Even from a pure technical standpoint I wonder how much use you could get from what Tesla is offering when each company would have pretty different approaches to self driving cars.

So was OnStar

[SuperKendall]

Yes OnStar cars have been similarly hacked, despite GM producing many millions of cars....

I'm not saying Tesla's security is perfect either, I am saying:

A) How much more important security is with a self-driving car where a hacker could literally drive a car, and

B) Tesla has had a much longer time with cars in production to think about this.

It's worth noting that the hack YOU linked to involved going in through the web browser that was actually IN THE CAR ITSELF. So you'd have to direct someone to visit a web site using the in-car browser.

The OnStar hacks have been purely remote, initialed from afar. And the hack you linked to did not affect the self-driving features, just the brakes.

Tesla is clearly being very careful and doing something right when they deliver car updates over the air and yet have not had any serious real-world exploits.

Re:Five million miles fully autonomous on public r

[SuperKendall]

Well, they have logged over 5 million miles of fully autonomous driving on public roads. Oh wait, that's Waymo.

Is Waymo Toyota? Or any other traditional car maker?

OH! Thanks for re-enforcing my point. I didn't say Tesla was the ONLY one ahead of the large car makers... I just said the car makers producing millions of cars now are way behind.

BMW, and several other auto companies, get more sensor data in a week

That is utter nonsense, you appear to be equating extremely primitive sensors like sonic devices and lane recognizers to a full 360 multi-camera camera rig or LIDAR (Tesla doesn't use LIDAR but Waymo does). Come on man. Sensor data from sensors that are not going to be the ones eventually used for self driving tech is vastly less valuable than data that is from the actual hardware that will be running the system.

There is a world of difference between lane assist (which incidentally can often go wrong, have you been in a car that has this???) and a car truly steering itself.

This also brings up another point, it doesn't matter how many millions of BMW cars have Lane Assist on when they have no way to get data back to BWM. All of that data is lost, of no use to BMW in development. Tesla has the ability to retrieve a lot of data off car hard drives during service or even to stream key factors back on the fly in a way almost all of the many millions of cars other car makers produce, cannot.