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Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

blog.willemmelching.nl

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Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#111

Post by OnlineGladiator »

userbinator wrote: post #109
phkahler wrote: post #95

>> Only try this on an actual car if you know what you’re doing. Even though only two very small patches are made to the model specific calibration values, making changes to your EPS might have unintended consequences. The author has no idea what he's doing, or more specifically what hazards might be lurking right under his nose. I worked in EPS for 6 years and it's all really cool stuff right up until you download c…

and it promptly turns left all the way to the stop the first time you touch the wheel. I bet many have had nearly the same experience with rebuilding a power steering gear... yet that's no justification for taking away control from the things you own. "Life is risk, risk is life."

> yet that's no justification for taking away control from the things you own

I'm a big believer in owning what you buy, but if what you're buying requires a license to operate and you intend to use it publicly, not to mention the various safety regulations and certifications required just for the product to be legal in the first place (which are likely ignored if not violated while modifying the product), then the justification is "not killing someone else accidentally."

This doesn't mean you can never hack anything, but you should be aware of the risks and potential consequences of your actions.

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#112

Post by userbinator »

bob1029 wrote: post #15
marcodiego wrote: post #11

Power Steering ECU... this things determines how the driving wheel makes the car turn. Safety issues must be considered.

I will never purchase a vehicle for my own purposes that does not use hydraulics for brakes and steering. Putting a computer between my foot/hands and the physics unfolding in front of me is a total non-starter.

I am reminded of the Boeing MCAS debacle, except instead of runaway trim, you now have "runaway steering wheel", and far less time to react...

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#113

Post by userbinator »

bob1029 wrote: post #77
martin8412 wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern is if the engineers were qualified and allowed to follow proper protocol for designing safety critical systems.

Also consider the budgets these engineers have to work with now. If cars had an average unit cost measured in 7-9 figures (i.e. like a Boeing 777), I would have substantially more trust in everything involved.

All that cost, and they still screwed up with the 737MAX...

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#114

Post by chrisseaton »

monocasa wrote: post #103
chrisseaton wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Hundreds of Megabytes? That’s a big number to you? If you only have a hundred MB of data to send… a hundred MB of key is sufficient to use as a one-time pad. Until digitisation the military literally did encryption over radios using physical pads - everyone carried a big one-time-pad (just a few tens of KB though). It was done as a lookup table rather than an XOR though.

The pad system used by the military predigitisation[0] was a set of keys to input into a keystream generator rather than a strict one time pad style system, except for very specific and limited espionage use cases. And it wouldn't be one time, it'd be on the order of a daily key rotation with key reuse (with maybe a few chosen per day depending on classification level). [0] I'm assuming we mean computerized here. Old…

> I'm assuming we mean computerized here

No, pre common man-pack digital radios, so as recently as just prior to this century. They used paper one-time pads, with a big list of table indices for substitution. You still get them for use when you have no digital crypto for whatever reason.

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#115

Post by olivermarks »

syshum wrote: post #108
olivermarks wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My concern is that all vehicles are becoming more and more surveilled, transmitting hugely personal data. Once level 4 centralized control is possible I predict pre permissioned requested travel will quickly follow. We urgently need a new generation of very basic transportation devices. The 3rd world relies on Toyo HiLuxes etc which are still easy to keep running. LandRover used to be all over the third world because…

>> I predict pre permissioned requested travel will quickly follow. Excuse me sir, Did you upload your drive path to NHTSA today? No that will be a $300 fine...

It's not too hard to imagine requesting permission to travel, a robotaxi showing up and taking you to your location and funds deducted per mile and for damage to the planet compensation, assuming you got the necessary permissions granted in the first place...

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#116

Post by pd0wm »

phkahler wrote: post #95

>> Only try this on an actual car if you know what you’re doing. Even though only two very small patches are made to the model specific calibration values, making changes to your EPS might have unintended consequences. The author has no idea what he's doing, or more specifically what hazards might be lurking right under his nose. I worked in EPS for 6 years and it's all really cool stuff right up until you download c…

In this case the EPS already came stock with the functionality to request torque over CAN, that part of the code or the amount of torque was not touched. I agree it would not be a good idea to patch that functionality into an EPS that doesn't come with that from the factory.

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#117

Post by oneplane »

userbinator wrote: post #109
phkahler wrote: post #95

>> Only try this on an actual car if you know what you’re doing. Even though only two very small patches are made to the model specific calibration values, making changes to your EPS might have unintended consequences. The author has no idea what he's doing, or more specifically what hazards might be lurking right under his nose. I worked in EPS for 6 years and it's all really cool stuff right up until you download c…

and it promptly turns left all the way to the stop the first time you touch the wheel. I bet many have had nearly the same experience with rebuilding a power steering gear... yet that's no justification for taking away control from the things you own. "Life is risk, risk is life."

As long as it's only your own life you risk and not that of others on the road, dependants in your household or something like that that need you to be around, sure.

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#118

Post by trulyme »

olivermarks wrote: post #94
t0mas88 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far electric vehicles are getting worse not better, because they're less regulated on things like OBD access. And manufactures see them as a chance to make an always connected car that phones home. Tesla was first but everyone else is copying them now.

My concern is that all vehicles are becoming more and more surveilled, transmitting hugely personal data. Once level 4 centralized control is possible I predict pre permissioned requested travel will quickly follow. We urgently need a new generation of very basic transportation devices. The 3rd world relies on Toyo HiLuxes etc which are still easy to keep running. LandRover used to be all over the third world because…

No technical solution will work against political problems. Any non-conforming vehicle will simply be forbidden. If you want to change anything, make it known how new cars phone home, what the dangers are, why this should be forbidden - only as a society can we prevent surveillance state.

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#119

Post by trulyme »

grishka wrote: post #93
t0mas88 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So far electric vehicles are getting worse not better, because they're less regulated on things like OBD access. And manufactures see them as a chance to make an always connected car that phones home. Tesla was first but everyone else is copying them now.

It's not like you can't disable these network interfaces one way or another. And of course it'll still work without this connectivity.

For now. Like web pages used to work if you disabled JavaScript.

Re: Hacking a VW Golf Power Steering ECU

#120

Post by balls187 »

j4hdufd8 wrote: post #17
blincoln wrote: post #9

This may go without saying, but a word of caution for anyone who wants to try this themselves: doing any sort of automated scanning of ECU hardware (e.g. the equivalent of trying to find undocumented opcodes in a CPU) stands a good chance of bricking the hardware (permanently), so plan to buy several of them if you want/need to go that route.

What does it mean to permanently brick the hardware?

> What does it mean to permanently brick the hardware?

Colloquially means rendering a device in useless state which cannot be recovered.

"Bricking" typically occurs when performing some sort of software update that goes awry, such as during powerfailure, using unofficial updates, etc.

More and more systems have ways to recover from a bad update, especially when the manufacturer offers OTA updates, but in the case like article where an the ECU is not designed to be updated by end-consumers, a bad flash/update can lead to the device being left useless.

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