Dude, who hacked my car?

David Heath
Wednesday, 19 May 2010 11:20

Business IT - Security

Surprise, surprise.  As soon as security researchers turn their attention to a new field of endeavour, they find holes you could drive a truck through.  So it is with car computer management systems.

In a paper to be presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy in Oakland, California on May 19th 2010 entitled "Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile", researchers from the University of California-San Diego and the University of Washington discovered that modern vehicle control systems have minimal, if any, resilience to any kind of attack.

By making use of the management port provided for service technicians (usually located in the glove compartment or under a panel in the centre console), the researchers were pretty-much able to influence the operation of the vehicle at will.

This included operating the brakes at any time or alternately, removing the brakes from the control of the driver.

The research pointed out that modern cars can have as much as 100 megabytes of operational code spread across as many as 70 control units.

According to the researchers, "We are able to forcibly and completely disengage the brakes while driving, making it difficult for the driver to stop.  Conversely, we are able to forcibly activate the brakes, lurching the driver forward and causing the car to stop suddenly."

The research found that it was not required to specifically send "well crafted" instructions, instead, mal-formed packets on the communications lines were sufficient to create the incorrect scenarios.

We can be relieved in the fact that cars are not (yet) connected to the Internet.  Once they are, clearly all bets are off.

"This represents an opportunity to head off a problem before it starts," said Rik Ferguson of Trend Micro, "in the not-too-distant future, it may represent a real risk to life."

Assume that the bad guys are reading this article!

'¦and if anyone is at all concerned about all this, iTWire has a 1960s Corolla you might want to buy!