TECHNOLOGY GAP
Can Your Car be Hacked? Safety and cost — these are the main factors that feed consumers’ desire to adopt a self-driving car according to a recent survey by CarInsurance. com. One in five consumers would switch to a driverless option today. If that increased safety also came with an 80 percent car insurance discount, the number jumps to 34 percent of those polled that would be “very likely” to buy now. These two issues are big factors for consumers right now, but what about privacy? It’s an issue that has gained a lot of public attention recently, including high-profile data collection by the National Security Administration and frequent headlines on unmanned aerial vehicle technology and spying. With automated vehicles in their infancy, privacy has not been thoroughly addressed in a public way. And with GM and Nissan both predicting the sale of autonomous vehicles by 2020, the time to do so may be ticking away. HACKING NOW Hacking into a modern car isn’t only possible; it’s already been done. In 2011, researchers from the University of Washington and the University of California San Diego both successfully hacked into the control systems of an unnamed brand of car to takeover features such as the computerized display and the vehicle’s brakes. This code cracking was possible because many modern vehicles use Bluetooth wireless technology and cellular connections. And hacking isn’t necessary for people outside of a car to know where it’s going and what it’s doing. Electric car manufacturer Tesla recently pulled the plug on a negative review in The New York Times. The
Tesla was able to remotely tap into information from one of its cars to disprove claims from The New York Times. Photo courtesy Tesla Motors.
writer claimed his Model S quickly had its maximum driving range drop after a full charge, and after he followed the company’s instructions, including adjusting temperature control, to maximize the juice left, the car eventually “limped along at 45 mph” and ran out of power on the highway, leaving him stranded. Company founder Elon Musk quickly dismissed the paper’s claims and pulled the vehicle’s logs, which showed the car was never fully charged, that it was driven faster than claimed in the article, that the heat was on and the driver took a lengthy detour — quite a bit of information on the actions and whereabouts of a driver the span of a continent away. WHITE-HAT HACKERS In August 2013, two white-hat hackers — coders that break into systems with the intent to expose weak points before others can do so maliciously — released a report that exposed that hackers can go far beyond controlling only a car’s brakes and electronic display. Dr. Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek, in their paper “Adventures in Automotive Networks and Control Units,” discuss how they took complete almost control over a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius, two car
models that have been used in highprofile driverless car demonstrations. The pair were able to manipulate the cars, which have features such as active park assist, lane keeping and a pre-collision system, by tapping into their electronic control units (ECUs). Those units are networked together on a minimum of one computing bus on the car’s controller area network (CAN). Spoofing data packets that were interpreted by the vehicles controlled things like the speedometer, odometer, fuel gauge, onboard navigation, steering, braking, acceleration, lights, horn and engine. Many of these hacks were possible via the computational components already in the cars because of their driver-assist features. The good news is, the paper says it is straightforward to detect the attacks they made by running vehicle diagnostics. The authors say they hope the paper leads to more discussion on how car hacking may become a reality so electronic control units can be made in a more secure way. “Automobiles have been designed with safety in mind. However, you cannot have safety without security,” the paper says. “If an attacker (or even a corrupted ECU) can send CAN packets, these might affect the safety of the vehicle.” MISSION CRITICAL
15