Cars, Security and a Peek into my Life
It’s a days-old Android, connected via WiFi, to a 2015 Jeep Cherokee with about 300 km.
As in – clean as it gets.
And this appears? The phone never rang? It’d been paired for about 4 minutes, it just popped up.
Don’t know what it means, but do think Facebook hooks deeper into our phones than we realize.
I’ve never given FB access to my photos, or contacts.
Blog tag = Facebook (8)
It’s my neighbours car. We spent a Sunday pulling out all the computers we could find.
Note the plural – computers.
Because there’s up to 100 computers in your car. Learn more in this column – the Computers in your Car.
Above – on the left are the fuses, on the right is the OBD port.
Whew, being a mechanic is physically taxing eh – hold a weirdo yoga-ish position for an extended time, hands above your head wrenching on wires.
Below are some of the connectors.
1 – there’s just one port you should know – the OBD II port. More here.
Was it assembled more cleanly and elegantly in your mind?
Was for me. There was no electrical tape in mine.
After all this turns out there’s no point in me hooking the computers up to my laptop for testing, since the protocols have changed drastically since 1999.
Made a nice blog header though.
The computer in your car runs on a network called CAN bus.
The Controller Area Network (CAN) is the standard for all vehicles. More specifically, inside your car there are almost 100 computers (called ECUs – Electronic Control Units) which use CAN bus to talk to one another.
Everything on the bus – big and small – is considered equal, so steering is equal to say, the fuel door latch. Moreover, the system never wonders where the message came from or who sent it, it just accepts and executes it.
Example: the fuel door button is pulled, sending a message that says, “open now!” and the fuel door says “okay got it, opening!”
That’s how car hacking works – because there’s no checks or balances, the system just accepts it and executes the command.
CAN bus was developed by Bosch in the 1980s, built when there was no outside world.
But then along came the Internet, and the connected car, and that’s why vehicles today are vulernable – they’re built on a system that isn’t ready to be secured for the internet because it never even imagined the internet would exist.
It’s an emerging industry that’s growing ridiculously quickly, auto companies have endless money, and there’s many verticals being created to choose from.
– fix CAN bus, that thing is a mess
– get good at D-Bus
– work for the companies that build the infotainment units eg. Harmon Kardon
– cellular companies, there’ll be a vertical dedicated to securing connected cars
– learn the QNX Operating System, 75% of cars use it
– figure out how to mass update older cars
– develop a penetration test for cars
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And with this post, I’ve now summarized a talk, that summarized another talk about that talk HAHA
It’s not that the technology isn’t here, we already drive semi-autonomous cars.
– laws and regulations must be established, a precedent set
– roads must be modified
– which means a city will need to establish a new division within their transportation department
– new maps created
– ensure the cell network can handle a massive increase in capacity, since autonomous cars hoover data
– new training courses and licensing, since the psychology of piloting an autonomous car is quite different than a regular vehicle. This is huge… to re-train a mind not to grab at the thing we’ve been trained to keep both hands on at all times…
Read it online at Autonet.
Who is going to pay for the the above list?
Automakers? Not likely. Our already-stretched tax dollars? Same answer. Does our Ministry of Transportation have a dedicated department to deal with this yet?
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