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Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
21–30 of 105 posts
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#22IMHO this is a good sign(!?) that they didn't even think about locking down their systems against the owner.
It's not good that they allow anyone that happens to be in your car briefly root access. It'd be live having an always-on laptop in your office with a open shell on it.
They should have provided some mechanism for the real owner to approve updates if the updates aren't all trusted by default.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#23Seeing more and more projects eschew code docs with the idea that "well architected code can be queried by LLMs" and stick to more functional runbook style docs. It really is unlikely that at any given point all of the docs of a project are up to date with the code. I'm generally aligned with this, but it is predicated on the whole "well architected" code part.
I'd rather see unit tests as documentation. The test can show intended use, show interesting corner cases, and I know it is up to date because it is constantly running and passing. I think that is a huge underrated benefit of adding a lot more testing. If I think a developer is going to ask a question of how something works, or about a corner case, isn't that deserving of a test, so they can just see proof of the ans…
I think unit tests are documentation in the same way that a Dockerfile is... it's not. The tests don't paint the bigger picture, explain why, etc.
That said, if you pitched me something like a Jupyter notebook style doc where tests validating the claims of the documentation were inline, I'd totally buy into that.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#24I’ve heard product managers proudly proclaim their firmware was signed using the corporate internal signing service (good). Of course, the question explicitly being asked (related to internal mandate) was if the firmware was signed — not if the firmware update process actually checked the signature (it certainly did not).
I once came across a similar "solution". The signing algorithm was directly executed from the update package. How would we otherwise be able to update the signature algorithm? Worst part was that it was correct at some point. It was an introduced regression because of a signature change due to " post-quantum safe" signatures now being required by the security team.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#25If I'm reading the room, the sentiment is Honda is incompetent and their cars are security holes on wheels. But if the opposite happened, they would be technofascists locking us out of our own cars, a 30 post sub-thread "this is why I drive a 1999 Ford Ranger" would ensue, and someone would be investigating it as a possible GPL violation. Do I have this right? It's also a good assumption most people airing such compl…
I think the evil valet risk isn't real, but this could be part of a chain-of-attack in some scenarios, mainly rental cars.
Like, sure, if you're just going to use it to spy on the user, you could also rent a rental car and leave a recording device under the floormat, or hidden behind the head unit, or whatever.
But if you have an Apple Carplay exploit, where someone tethering their phone to the car can be compromised, renting a car and flashing a malicious OS to exploit the phones of people who come after you could maybe be a real attack. It's kinda hard to get people to otherwise connect to a malicious infotainment system with carplay, so if you have an exploit that requires that, this could be part of it...
Except actually, no, if you have a carplay exploit, just rent the car, and rewire the USB port to go through a flipper zero or whatever and don't bother reflashing the car's software, that's just as easy.
... So yeah, I guess I agree with you, even in the rental car scenario, where this seems like it would be worst, your attacker might as well just hide something in the car instead of flashing the software.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#26Wonder how good the rest of the security is. The head unit is likely hooked up to a CAN gateway, can it call into telematics. Maybe find some novel way to abuse carplay/aa to call home.
If you have physical access to a car and want to phone home, may I recommend leaving a gps tracking device under the floormat.
It works on more brands of cars too than just one gen of honda civics, and probably quicker to install.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#27If I'm reading the room, the sentiment is Honda is incompetent and their cars are security holes on wheels. But if the opposite happened, they would be technofascists locking us out of our own cars, a 30 post sub-thread "this is why I drive a 1999 Ford Ranger" would ensue, and someone would be investigating it as a possible GPL violation. Do I have this right? It's also a good assumption most people airing such compl…
I think the evil valet risk isn't real, but this could be part of a chain-of-attack in some scenarios, mainly rental cars. Like, sure, if you're just going to use it to spy on the user, you could also rent a rental car and leave a recording device under the floormat, or hidden behind the head unit, or whatever. But if you have an Apple Carplay exploit, where someone tethering their phone to the car can be compromised…
Yeah ultimately society really relies on the fact that most people aren't actively trying to be evil.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#28If I'm reading the room, the sentiment is Honda is incompetent and their cars are security holes on wheels. But if the opposite happened, they would be technofascists locking us out of our own cars, a 30 post sub-thread "this is why I drive a 1999 Ford Ranger" would ensue, and someone would be investigating it as a possible GPL violation. Do I have this right? It's also a good assumption most people airing such compl…
I think the evil valet risk isn't real, but this could be part of a chain-of-attack in some scenarios, mainly rental cars. Like, sure, if you're just going to use it to spy on the user, you could also rent a rental car and leave a recording device under the floormat, or hidden behind the head unit, or whatever. But if you have an Apple Carplay exploit, where someone tethering their phone to the car can be compromised…
Having rented a car and seeing 80 variations of "Ben's iPhone" in the Bluetooth pairing list leads me to believe 99.99% of society isn't worried about this.
Another thing to consider is Honda may have signed these packages with a wink and a nudge, because it may be required, regulatory or Android or otherwise, but they're also not interested in building closed devices. Instead of thanking them we're complaining.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#29Honda knows how to build great cars but they haven't up-skilled their software knowledge.
Re: Honda Civics and the Evil Valet
#30To update 10th-gen Honda Civics, Honda ships updates on specially-formatted USB drives. They're essentially Android 4.2.2rc1-era recovery packages with some Honda-added version checks (which can be spoofed). The packages are signed with the publicly-known AOSP test key, so with physical access to the front USB port you can sign and flash your own package for arbitrary code execution on the headunit. This doesn't requ…
Thanks so much for your analysis. This kind of investigation and exposure of lazy work is the reason I love hacker news.