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An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

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Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#13
post #10

Can you imagine the havok when terrorists figure out they can program cars to hunt and kill pedestrians in crowded spaces? Currently the terrorist needs to drive the vehicle, which makes it a suicide mission. How much more deadly would it be if it was reduced to just the cost of the car and a low chance of getting caught? How can we defend against this?

Thats all wild imagination. Remote control cars are a pretty old thing. Hollywood has been doing it for years. Terrorists typically want to be caught, well at least identified and they are not fully rational actors as while they often manage to escalate fear they don't tend to acheive many of their stated political goals.

Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#14
post #10

Can you imagine the havok when terrorists figure out they can program cars to hunt and kill pedestrians in crowded spaces? Currently the terrorist needs to drive the vehicle, which makes it a suicide mission. How much more deadly would it be if it was reduced to just the cost of the car and a low chance of getting caught? How can we defend against this?

I have a hard time imagining self-driving cars merely negotiating the traffic I drive in each day much less deal with the myriad foreign policy and security issues that have led us to this point in time. Imagine the lawsuits if it can ever be proved that a murder was committed by someone hacking an automobile--and I do suspect it has already happened. The drive-by-wire gas pedal and shifter in my car cause me concern. We need better low-tech kill switches and backup mechanisms and way less reliance on fancy tech.

Also, there is no connection between "hacking" the CAN bus in today's cars and doing anything like providing access to adjust the A/C blower level in some future self-driving livery mobile. Why anyone would think there would be even the remotest connection between how CAN bus works today and how some future consumer-oriented interface would work demonstrates dangerous naviete.

Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#15
post #2

Interesting - never realized there would be multiple CAN buses in a car. That probably makes it a lot easier to not screw things up - if you know that the medium speed bus is only connected to non-safety-critical systems, then it's easier to trust that when you send out your hand-crafted CAN packets, you're not going to cause anything too drastic to happen.

Not all automakers do this. There are vehicles where the obd-ii port has access to the main CAN bus.

Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#16
post #11

Hmm, I hope they're not planning on using ROS for the final product... using a non-hard-realtime OS to fully control a car is a spectacularly bad idea.

So is making a car so hard to work on that it has to go back to the dealership just to change out a dead bulb.

Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#17
post #10

Can you imagine the havok when terrorists figure out they can program cars to hunt and kill pedestrians in crowded spaces? Currently the terrorist needs to drive the vehicle, which makes it a suicide mission. How much more deadly would it be if it was reduced to just the cost of the car and a low chance of getting caught? How can we defend against this?

A car could be self-driven while not connecting to any external networks. It still can get fresh traffic or weather data, but with those, you can't take over a car to make it a weapon.

Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#18
post #10

Can you imagine the havok when terrorists figure out they can program cars to hunt and kill pedestrians in crowded spaces? Currently the terrorist needs to drive the vehicle, which makes it a suicide mission. How much more deadly would it be if it was reduced to just the cost of the car and a low chance of getting caught? How can we defend against this?

The way we always defend a network--authentication and encryption.

If your CAN nodes are all authenticated to one another, it's a lot harder to hack.

The downside is that they're a lot harder to hack, in the good sense of the term.

Re: An Introduction to the CAN Bus: How to Programmatically Control a Car

#20
post #10

Can you imagine the havok when terrorists figure out they can program cars to hunt and kill pedestrians in crowded spaces? Currently the terrorist needs to drive the vehicle, which makes it a suicide mission. How much more deadly would it be if it was reduced to just the cost of the car and a low chance of getting caught? How can we defend against this?

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