Why they were analyzing time/distance curves, steering wheel angles, temperature, etc. instead of just using accelerometer to check if car is really moving?
A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
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Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#32> In 2015, regulators realized that diesel Volkswagens and Audis were emitting several times the legal limit of nitrogen oxides (NOx) during real-world driving tests. This means that they can detect emissions levels during real world driving tests. What's wrong with just making those tests the actual regulatory ones? So whatever ingenuity automakers can use will be put to minimizing emissions in the exact same scenar…
-One problem with that approach is that it would make testing for compliance much, much more expensive.
One thing would be all the equipment and manpower every test facility would need to invest in (as DonHopkins points out below) - but also, in order to gain initial approval, you couldn't just rely on one or even a few random drives - in order for the numbers to make any sense, you'd need a large sample size - lots of different drivers, driving the cars under different conditions - until you had enough data points to come up with a meaningful figure.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#33While I certainly don't support the 'rogue engineer' excuse that VW originally gave everyone, the idea does bring up an interesting point. An engineer did write this code. Almost certainly, many of them, working together. Now, their managers told them it was okay to do this, maybe that legal had given the go-ahead or that they had to do it to keep their jobs... But it's still pretty clear that this was not right. The…
If I were an evil VP tasked with creating this loop hole, I'd tell my project manager we needed a configurable system that let us control emissions for our intneral testing environments or some other plausible and legal requirement. I'd keep the knowledge of the system obscure and communication between dev, testing and deployment sparse. I'd then have only one person change the configuration before deployment. I'm su…
Just imagine how Facebook must have (initially) pushed the datr cookie on its engineers: "We only need to track everyone like this to check against DDoS attacks."
Still, even such an excuse should have raised alarm bells, but I assume most developers would just shrug their shoulders and develop the feature anyway, as they would've liked to keep their nice-paying job and juicy stock options.
In reality, Facebook only recently used the DDoS protection excuse for its datr cookie, well after it announced that the cookie would be used for advertising purposes, which also happened a few years after the cookie was introduced.
I imagine whatever Facebook told developers then was even less subtle than "using it for security purposes", and that most of the developers figured it out right then that the datr cookie would be one day used to track users across the web for advertising purposes.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#34Why they were analyzing time/distance curves, steering wheel angles, temperature, etc. instead of just using accelerometer to check if car is really moving?
I don't think there's any accessible to the software. They are used for airbags, but I think that's not on the CAN bus. If one were, it might be too dead a giveaway to poll it, since you already have speed via rotational sensors.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
The real world sanity checks for cheating make sense. But the nature of the regular tests can't be secret. Carmakers need to know the bar they are supposed to hit. Building something on the speculation that it might pass, maybe, is a whole different business model.
"Build a car that doesn't emit more than X of exhaust Y when a typical driver drives it a) ten kilometers in the city, b) a hundred kilometers on the highway." That seems like a good enough requirement to me. Define "a typical driver" as "out of a hundred random test drivers, no more than 20 exceed the thresholds, no more than 5 exceed the thresholds by more than a factor two." That forces the car manufacturers to ha…
So this is going to happen once they've built the car + engine, and started selling it? Is 'car tester' going to become a side-hustle?
I agree that a degree of randomness is likely a good idea to avoid defeat devices, but one also has to consider that it could have two unintended consequences: 1) more expensive cars, due to more stringent QA procedures 2) relaxing of standards to ensure that companies can still practically make cars that conform to 'standards.'
As ever, it's important to consider that a layman's "seems reasonable to me" is another experts "that's not how things work."
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were an evil VP tasked with creating this loop hole, I'd tell my project manager we needed a configurable system that let us control emissions for our intneral testing environments or some other plausible and legal requirement. I'd keep the knowledge of the system obscure and communication between dev, testing and deployment sparse. I'd then have only one person change the configuration before deployment. I'm su…
If I was an evil VP, I would give my eningeers the incentive to do something without giving them a direct order. So, you might tell them: If you can improve gas millage by X% you get a huge bonus and I don't care how you do it.
This is how modern companies break the rules. Management doesn't break the rules, either overtly or covertly. Management scrupulously follows the rules, while placing requirements on their workers that can only be met by breaking the rules.
Want your workers to work more, but you don't want to pay overtime, or you run into trouble with regulations about consecutive hours on the job? Just bump up how much work they have to get done, threaten to fire low performers, and make it clear that under no circumstances is anyone allowed to work overtime. Your workers will start working off the clock, and better yet they'll hide it from you, so you can legitimately plead ignorance if the law comes after you.
Want to cut corners on safety to save money? Tell your people that safety is the top priority but you need to see an X% reduction in costs, and it works itself out. They may fudge or falsify metrics, but if you're really lucky they'll find loopholes in the metrics instead.
(I have a friend who worked at a warehouse and fell victim to this. They were officially big on safety, which included bonuses for everyone if they went a certain period of time without any safety incidents. Unofficially, this meant that incidents wouldn't be reported unless it was unavoidable. The one way to ensure that an incident had to be reported was to see a doctor for your injury, so people were heavily encouraged to wait to see if they got better on their own before they got medical attention, which often made things much worse. I'm sure upper management's metrics looked great, though.)
As an added bonus, this sort of thing gives you a lot more control over workers. If you want to get rid of a troublemaker, do a little digging and you'll surely discover that they're violating safety rules or working off the clock or whatever. Everybody is, but selective enforcement is a wonderful thing.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#37I may be missing something here, but if you take a step back this just seems like a tragedy of misaligned economic incentives. Both the US & EU would have wanted this information from day one, and this whole fiasco cost VW billions in fines. There would have been any number of engineers at VW and Bosch that knew exactly how this worked, but there was nothing in it for them to come clear about it. They were never goin…
I don't know for certain whether the concept of a bounty was considered, and if so why it was rejected. But I can think of a few possibly good reasons to not do this. For one thing, it could be thought of as rewarding the engineers who wrote the evil code, maybe even creating an incentive for engineers to add such code in the future. There are precedents for enforcement actions having the unintended consequence of ca…
You may wish to prosecute them either way, and you might offer them immunity either way.
Doing this would just guarantee that if they were eligible for lenient handling or immunity that they'd get a handsome cash payout by ratting on their management or giving investigators details relevant to the case, but which they didn't think to look for.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I were an evil VP tasked with creating this loop hole, I'd tell my project manager we needed a configurable system that let us control emissions for our intneral testing environments or some other plausible and legal requirement. I'd keep the knowledge of the system obscure and communication between dev, testing and deployment sparse. I'd then have only one person change the configuration before deployment. I'm su…
Just imagine how Facebook must have (initially) pushed the datr cookie on its engineers: "We only need to track everyone like this to check against DDoS attacks." Still, even such an excuse should have raised alarm bells, but I assume most developers would just shrug their shoulders and develop the feature anyway, as they would've liked to keep their nice-paying job and juicy stock options. In reality, Facebook only…
I'm pretty sure people who work for Facebook are completely aware of the company's methodologies and are completely OK with it.
The conversation would be more along the lines of "We need to track people who aren't logged in, suggestions?"
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#39> Firmware images were gleaned from car-tuning forums and from an online portal maintained by Volkswagen for car repair shops. Documentation, in the form of so-called “function sheets,” was harder to come by. The function sheets were necessary to give the binary context, but the sheets are copyrighted by Bosch and generally not shared with the public. The research team ended up turning to the auto-performance tuning…
I would say that this argues for the opposite - making firmware closed source and as hard to reverse engineer as possible.
Let's say that the software is open source, and you can buy your own microcontroller and turn it into an ECU.
There will be people who make their own modifications to it to improve performance. Some of those modifications make the car fail an emissions test, so they make it so that the car acts like it's at stock settings during those tests.
Re: A year of digging through code yields “smoking gun” on VW, Fiat diesel cheats
#40> Firmware images were gleaned from car-tuning forums and from an online portal maintained by Volkswagen for car repair shops. Documentation, in the form of so-called “function sheets,” was harder to come by. The function sheets were necessary to give the binary context, but the sheets are copyrighted by Bosch and generally not shared with the public. The research team ended up turning to the auto-performance tuning…
I would be very surprised if such a thing exists. Are there any industries, safety critical or otherwise, where the default is open source? If not, why would anyone think to justify the decision to not open source code, and especially why would anyone think to make such a memo or piece of research public?
>Are there any industries, safety critical or otherwise, where the default is open source?
Cryptography.[0] When trustworthiness is paramount, as in crypto (and IMO in safety-critical applications like this), being able to inspect the code helps a lot.
[0] https://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram/archives/1999/0915.html...