301–310 of 576 posts
A whole lot of people have these on their own cars, any DIYer can do it in an hour or two. I may or may not have one on mine. But the "security" comes from there being no standard location for any of the components.
>At the end of the three-year project, the team aims to have a commercially viable prototype that can be scaled up to commercial production, first as a theft deterrent device, and potentially later as a complete vehicle entry and control system that could replace traditional keys and fobs. What's the point of this? Modern cars already have engines that are cryptographically tied to keys[1]. They're not perfect, but i…
What about a classical mechanical key? I am referring to a laser cut key, the type that can't be easily lock picked, other than in Hollywood movies. The problem is relay theft, where thief's relay the signal of your fob key inside the house to the car via a simple antenna and amplifier system. Cryptographically signing won't help. However, this can be fixed by adding a motion sensor that makes key fobs go into a slee…
I knew someone with a shitty pickup truck where he wired a light switch into the fuel pump and hid it under the steering column. The truck would be stolen something like 5 times a year and every time he would find it abandoned a km or so away when the gas in the line ran out. I drove in it once to get lunch and near the beginning the car begins sputtering and he's like, "oh right, you're thirsty" and reached under an…
My car in high school had a similar system. The radiator fan didn't turn on automatically, so my dad wired it directly into the AC controller. (The AC also did not work. It was not a great car.) If you got in the car, and did not specifically turn the AC to the correct setting, the car would overheat about a mile down the road. Luckily for me, I never had a chance to put this into practice, because nobody stole my ca…
All that trouble, rather than run to NAPA to spend $12 on the thermo-switch that would be easier to install than hacking into the A/C controller. Yeah, I've known some dads like that.
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$1.2 million will fund 4 years of research for 2 professors, and 2 PhD students. It’s not exactly a career making grant.
That seems extravagant. By my calculations it should fund approximately 6 or so years.
https://osr.ucsf.edu/news/nih-update-ruth-l-kirschstein-nati....
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I work for a major OEM in automotive. Getting ANYTHING “simple” into real cars, especially anything related to physical access and starting the vehicle, is a huge undertaking. $1.2 mm is cheap for this sort of feature, assuming that money goes to the actual implementation, standardization, homologation, and integration on the assembly line.
Car OEM are far as example of efficient work…
The car is a complicated product. It’s not a website. It’s not an app. My employer has 120k+ employees and factories in every continent except Antarctica. Regulatory bodies interject with anything related to access and security, and those bodies are different in every country/region. The product itself is massive physical good that many countries consider domestic production of which to be a matter of national security. Every single physical change to the product is analyzed by bean counters. Shipping the product requires at least some level of expertise in mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, hardware, software, and manufacturing. You need factories, regulatory approval, supplier networks, programmers, drivetrain engineers, management, people to lobby the government, accountants, and much more. You need it all.
You’d be shocked at how difficult adding a single physical button to any given car can be. Scoffing at $1.2mm for a new ECU that relates to security is naive. “I could do this in one day in my garage” is not how shipping a change to automotive products works.
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Half is taken by the university? How does that work?
Renting the space to the departments and other similar things probably. I wish I was joking, but a friend who works at a Uni was recently complaining of their budget being affected by (mandatory) things like that.
A big problem is they don't always get all the money they apply for, and so with the added overhead there's sometimes very little left to do actual science.
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That amount of money is absolutely nothing compared to the waste that goes on in the startup industry. Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van?
The "waste" in the startup industry has corrective mechanisms built in. Investors can pull their money out and take their business elsewhere. Taxpayers cannot pull their money out of the NSF and reallocate it to a different government agency.
So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research. That’s like 5 developers for one year who would otherwise be allocated by the invisible hand into effectively useless endeavors like high frequency trading or ad tech.
Cut to the alternative universe where they’re working at Blackrock and a car thief is driving their car away.
This is a very engineering solution to a very not-engineering problem. Would this deter thieves? Possibly! Would thieves eventually be able to work around it? Also probably! Would it increase the friction of getting in and driving? Definitely! Today, your house keys are basically useless for security -- getting into your house is trivially easy both destructively and not. But we all use house keys because they feel s…
Absolutely not the case. With toughened glass and modern reinforced doors it is very far from trivial. At least in the UK. I understand security standards can be much lower depending on the country.