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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

#231

Post by SoftTalker »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #117
foobarian wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No "boot times". They just worked Haha wait until you find out how TVs worked in the 70s and how fast it was to change the channel *sob*

Even in the 90s, you could just power it on and it would show image near-instantly. Warm-up time and channel switch time were all firmly under one second. With the exception of cable TV set-top boxes, which were separate devices and first to include the ridiculous boot times and delays, that still would seem blazingly fast compared to what we have today...

Go back in time a little more and there was definitely "warm up" time for electonics. Tubes had to get up to operating temp, etc. When I was a kid I remember turning on the TV about ten minutes before my dad got home so it would be warmed up and ready for him to watch the evening news.

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

#232

Post by praptak »

ARandomerDude wrote: post #202
praptak wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Wait, what? You don’t think a country with a population of 41M has experience with corporate crime?

38M and no, not this kind of corporate crime. Plain financial fraud - sure. This case is much more complicated though.

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

#233

Post by vagrantJin »

bee_rider wrote: post #188
WesolyKubeczek wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can’t you create an NGO that will collectively represent and lobby on behalf of the group, hiring lobbyists from membership fees and other fundraisers? Holy hell, maybe create a political party?

Me personally? No, I don’t think I have the connections, patience, or talent for that. If I did I’d probably do it for a big company instead, they pay better than “we the people,” I think.

or once you have enough money to not care about it as much , you can focus on "we the people" but I doubt thats likely .

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

#234

Post by mrguyorama »

jtriangle wrote: post #181
webel0 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is quite interesting because you can imagine that lobbyists would argue that standardization would “stymie innovation.” If F1 does it why can’t you?

One could easily argue that F1 hasn't innovated much in the last decade or so. The coolest stuff we get is clever aero and advantageous workarounds that get outlawed extremely fast.

You are extremely downplaying the "clever" aero. Remember, simulation time and costs are regulated in F1. The innovation is producing extremely effective aero with minimal brute force simulation.

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

#235

Post by Tade0 »

tensility wrote: post #205
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".

Unfortunately for Newag, other than in the court of public opinion, firmware deliveries count as written evidence.

Part of their statement says(loosely translated):

"No hacker can tell, based on the content of the digital record alone, who is the author of the digital record in question"

Boy oh boy. Either they're not singing their firmware (which is a serious indictment in and of itself) or proving that it was them all along will be trivial, but the ones signing off this message are unaware of this.

Overall they got caught with their pants down and handling it badly as evidenced by the fact that they don't even have a scapegoat prepared.

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

#236

Post by upwardbound »

blowski wrote: post #228
upwardbound wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sometimes it may not be obvious but the feature still might seem super suspicious. For example, suppose that the malware discussed in this article was broken down into two sub-features assigned to different people: geofencing detection, and bricking the train. The person writing the "bricking the train" part should have realized that there is practically no legitimate reason for that code to be written, and if they a…

> The person writing the "bricking the train" part should have realized that there is practically no legitimate reason for that code to be written Hey Janusz, can you build a safety feature that prevents the train from operating under certain conditions. We don’t know all the conditions yet, so leave it flexible.

Even so, wouldn't someone still have to write either an if-then statement, or a database entry, to connect the geofencing capability to the bricking capability? Even if that was only a single line of code or SQL, it seems like a smoking gun and whoever did it can't possibly plead ignorance. No one who can operate a keyboard is that dumb.

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

#237

Post by KptMarchewa »

chronicsonic wrote: post #126
amelius wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

That wasn’t intentional though.

Google fucks up Firefox experience so often. For a company that large, both intentionally doing it and ignorance (eg. not testing on Firefox) is actually malice. Pretty much only company that has this problem.

Go check out GCP web UI on Firefox and tell me it's not intentional.

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

#238

Post by dylan604 »

Xelbair wrote: post #149
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…

It will be stuck in legal hell due to conflicts of interests. Trains already exist, and they need to work - but maintenance/repair companies cannot legally modify software of them due to copyrights. It's a catch22 situation. I honestly hope that company will be fined to the oblivion, and for criminal charges for that, but i doubt it will happen.

How does one become an train repair company if there are no trains that you are allowed to repair?

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

#239

Post by Log_out_ »

SoftTalker wrote: post #224
danhor wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure if you've ever used modern software. It's sometimes amazing just how unreliable it is. Web browsers crash every few weeks, windows is known for regularly needing a reboot, evince regularly crashes on me, you can't call 911 with some of cell phones, ... . This reminds me of https://danluu.com/everything-is-broken/ . The clearest example of the difference of reliability is looking at public digital signage…

Yep, I don't eat fast food nearly as much as I used to but whenever I go in to a place with self-service ordering "kiosks" one or more of the kiosks is often out of service or frozen up, sometimes with a Windows error screen, or just stuck in a reboot loop, or it randomly resets in the middle of entering an order.

[flagged]

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

#240

Post by dn3500 »

db48x wrote: post #171
Xelbair wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It will be stuck in legal hell due to conflicts of interests. Trains already exist, and they need to work - but maintenance/repair companies cannot legally modify software of them due to copyrights. It's a catch22 situation. I honestly hope that company will be fined to the oblivion, and for criminal charges for that, but i doubt it will happen.

Of course laws vary, and Polish copyright law might be completely crazy, but around here copyright only covers distribution of copies. It does not make it illegal to modify software that you own. It only limits distribution of copies of that software, modified or otherwise. If the owner of the train wants to modify the software then there is probably nothing stopping them.

I don't know anything about Polish law either, but in the US, copyright law (DMCA in particular) makes it illegal to modify the software in a device you own, if it requires circumventing protection code or devices. Which it probably would in this case.
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