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Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

badcyber.com

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Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#121

Post by mcv »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #63
dzdt wrote: post #62

Its insane how brazen this is. Code that 'bricks' the train locomotive if its gps coordinates remain with bounds of a competing repair facility for more than ten days! This is way beyond putting information barriers to repair, like undocumented interfaces or even crypto-signed firmware. This is actively malicious destruction of property. I don't know anything about the legal system in Poland, but I can't imagine how…

If an individual did this, they'd go to prison.

Companies are made up of individuals. I'm all for holding everybody who contributed to this malware accountable.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#122

Post by TeMPOraL »

twisteriffic wrote: post #33
lqet wrote: post #28

My impression is that the quality of train firmware is generally not very good, and I hope that this scandal will lead to greater scrutiny. 3 years ago, Deutsche Bahn publicly complained of "grotesque" software problems with newly delivered Bombardier trains. For example, when train drivers changed the direction of travel, the train software would crash. It then took 1 hour to boot the train up again [0]. Switzerland…

Bad software is a symptom, not the cause.

Here it's more like the software - any software - is a problem. I agree with GP, and my experience confirms that adding software to something that used to work without it almost universally makes it worse in every aspect, understandability and repairability being just two major ones. On top of that, taking anything that run on old-school industrial/embedded firmware and replacing that with software using modern practices and stacks of the software industry, 100% makes the product go to shit.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#125

Post by marcosdumay »

RecycledEle wrote: post #84

I wonder if the solution to all these screwy engine controls (tampering with emissions testing, preventing 3rd party repairs, etc.) is to standardize the interfaces to these systems so they can be replaced. Standardizing the outputs of the sensors would let us swap in and out various components to ensure the system is not cheating the regulators.

It's a bit more than standardizing, since you must also remove the barriers to changing the software. And you don't need full standardization, just publicity.

But yes, it's basically it.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#126

Post by chronicsonic »

amelius wrote: post #47
cedilla wrote: post #44

It's one thing to implement a secret handshake and underdocument some procedures to make your competitors look incompetent, but actively breaking your product when it's in your competitor's shop - that reqires some chutzpah.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38345858

That wasn’t intentional though.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#127

Post by praptak »

mcv wrote: post #121
toomuchtodo wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If an individual did this, they'd go to prison.

Companies are made up of individuals. I'm all for holding everybody who contributed to this malware accountable.

I don't believe the Polish judicial systems has experience in dealing with corporate crime, especially of the tech-related kind. I'm a bit afraid of disappointment here.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#128

Post by Tade0 »

senkora wrote: post #107
Tade0 wrote: post #80

Newag issued a statement since, denying all allegations and saying that it was their competition which "hired hackers to slander them". I've met q3k because we used to work at the same company and briefly on a project together. Not the kind of person I would suspect of participating in a conspiracy of this sort and Newag's statement generally reads like "we didn't think we would get caught".

^I think this is being downvoted because of poor reading comprehension skills. Please note that the parent comment is in favor of the hacking group.

Thank you for pointing this out - I reread the post and can imagine now how someone would read it differently than I intended.

Re: Dieselgate, but for trains – some heavyweight hardware hacking

#129

Post by shpx »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #30

Great advert for free and open source software. As with dieselgate, this suggests you basically cannot trust anything containing software. Can't trust it to follow regulations. Can't trust it to do its job. Can't trust the software. Can't trust the institutions that write the software. All very "late stage capitalist software development".

It doesn't actually need to be open source. If they published binaries that would be enough to analyze.
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