Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway • Hacker News Board

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#41

Post by ObviousScience » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:58 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #35

tombrossman wrote: post #12

Some questions for the researchers, or anyone else who thinks this was okay: 1) Were public roadways and speeds of 70mph absolutely necessary to demo this? 2) What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early and had to swerve or panic stop, possibly crashing and injuring themselves or others? 3) Anyone notify the Missouri State Highway Patrol about this? They may be contacting…

You're not gonna make the news unless the media can spin up a headline that scares people People won't pay attention until they're scared People won't demand action if they're not paying attention Nothing will happened if people don't demand action. If nothing happens the status quo (vulnerable systems) will remain. Until some bad actor (I'm sure several nations states would love that capability) gets into onStar and…

> I'm not sure if you're actually this dense or just trolling. What good can involving the police, after the fact, in a situation where nobody was harmed do?

People who do one reckless thing such as this demo are likely to do others. Calling the police about this incident means that they'll have a record of the people doing this, and if it becomes a pattern, handle it considerably harsher than an isolated incident.

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#42

Post by cameldrv » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 1:58 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #9

maxerickson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote start via cell phone is a very marketable feature. Once you get there, doing things like turning on the heat or AC are nice tack ons.

Remote start I can see the reasoning for, but remote stop just seems to be asking for trouble.

The obvious but security-oblivious way to do this is to just connect the entertainment system that has the internet connection to one of the car's microcontroller busses. Even if it just needs to send a single command, it's easier than adding another pin and another wire to the appropriate microcontroller on the other end. The problem is that everything on these busses is completely trusted, and there's no authentication. The window motor can't tell whether the signal to roll down the window came from a switch or from the entertainment system.

The simple solution is just to have a separate wire for everything, and source devices that aren't supposed to control destination devices don't get those wires connected. The problem is that the automakers went to microcontroller busses because this creates a rats nest of wires.

The level 2 solution is have some sort of low-level filtering on the commands that are going out from a controller on the bus, so any command that the entertainment system sends to turn off the transmission doesn't make it onto the bus.

The level 3 solution is to have some sort of cryptographic authentication of entities on the bus, so that the endpoint can decide what commands it's going to accept from what source.

As you go from level 1 to level 2 to level 3, the system is more flexible, adaptable, and upgradable, but it's more complex, and thus more brittle to attack. Sorting out how to handle this sort of thing is going to be a big challenge as IoT pushes into more devices.

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#43

Post by nekopa » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:02 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #35

tombrossman wrote: post #12

Some questions for the researchers, or anyone else who thinks this was okay: 1) Were public roadways and speeds of 70mph absolutely necessary to demo this? 2) What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early and had to swerve or panic stop, possibly crashing and injuring themselves or others? 3) Anyone notify the Missouri State Highway Patrol about this? They may be contacting…

You're not gonna make the news unless the media can spin up a headline that scares people People won't pay attention until they're scared People won't demand action if they're not paying attention Nothing will happened if people don't demand action. If nothing happens the status quo (vulnerable systems) will remain. Until some bad actor (I'm sure several nations states would love that capability) gets into onStar and…

>I'm not sure if you're actually this dense or just trolling. What good can involving the police, after the fact, in a situation where nobody was harmed do?

I don't know, maybe if they get in trouble the next researcher who wants to do a test by disabling a car doing 70mph on a public road will maybe just alert a few people and make sure that it would be impossible for someone innocent to die during their testing.

I was with your comment until you called the GP dense or a troll. Because to follow your logic, to get action, they should've just actually killed a random person. Then you'd be right, we would get some changes, pretty quick.

Who do you think should be the random person to get killed for change?

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#44

Post by spaceisballer » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:04 PM UTC

Well luckily my Chrysler despite only being a year old does not have this connectivity. It does have Uconnect which I despise, I keep contacting Chrysler to demand that they offer the ability to use Apple Carplay or the Google equivalent. To be fair there has yet to be a vehicle that has a nice easy to use controls for radio or media.

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#45

Post by logfromblammo » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:05 PM UTC

jon-wood wrote: post #9

maxerickson wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote start via cell phone is a very marketable feature. Once you get there, doing things like turning on the heat or AC are nice tack ons.

Remote start I can see the reasoning for, but remote stop just seems to be asking for trouble.

Absolutely. But I can think of one very easy check that would solve many potentially serious problems.

Disable remote operation of car hardware when a conscious human is detected at the manual controls.

For some reason, this reminds me of Star Trek episodes where the crew has to transfer operation control of the Enterprise from the bridge down to engineering, or to another Starfleet ship. Even on a sci-fi television show, whenever that happened, it seems like they always had to enter a secret security code or have multiple bridge officers give their authorization codes.

It speaks poorly of your product design when writers for a television show give more thought to security than you.

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#46

Post by geofft » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:05 PM UTC

tombrossman wrote: post #12

Some questions for the researchers, or anyone else who thinks this was okay: 1) Were public roadways and speeds of 70mph absolutely necessary to demo this? 2) What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early and had to swerve or panic stop, possibly crashing and injuring themselves or others? 3) Anyone notify the Missouri State Highway Patrol about this? They may be contacting…

You called the cops on two security researchers and a journalist, because you disagreed with their methods and weren't sure what their plans were and what authorities they'd talked to? (And not just any cops, the cops in St. Louis, for bonus points.)

Are we still on Hacker News, or is the transformation to Enablers of Traditional American Power Structure News complete?

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#47

Post by genericuser » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:06 PM UTC

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #35

tombrossman wrote: post #12

Some questions for the researchers, or anyone else who thinks this was okay: 1) Were public roadways and speeds of 70mph absolutely necessary to demo this? 2) What was the plan if the trucker approaching at 70mph hadn't seen the Jeep stalled early and had to swerve or panic stop, possibly crashing and injuring themselves or others? 3) Anyone notify the Missouri State Highway Patrol about this? They may be contacting…

You're not gonna make the news unless the media can spin up a headline that scares people People won't pay attention until they're scared People won't demand action if they're not paying attention Nothing will happened if people don't demand action. If nothing happens the status quo (vulnerable systems) will remain. Until some bad actor (I'm sure several nations states would love that capability) gets into onStar and…

I agree they may not make news if they did this in a safe manner.

However, the goal of people researching security, shouldn't be to make news. And these people while admittedly working with Chrysler to see it fixed, seem to be forgetting that. Especially since they plan to release their code, despite the fact that Chrysler has to get people to manually update their cars.

"The two researchers say that even if their code makes it easier for malicious hackers to attack unpatched Jeeps, the release is nonetheless warranted because it allows their work to be proven through peer review."

Their justification for releasing their code, as someone who works in peer reviewed industries is weak and they clearly are prioritizing attention over security at this point.

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#48

Post by Kliment » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:07 PM UTC

So if I'm understanding this correctly, the initial vulnerability is remote-exploitable and relies on a firmware patch. Why wouldn't the manufacturer use the same exploit to patch all affected vehicles rather than calling them in for service?

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#49

Post by philipw » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:08 PM UTC

leereeves wrote: post #36

cameldrv wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And what are we going to do for self-driving cars? These are almost certainly going to rely heavily on internet access to perform basic driving functions. Figuring out how to make complex systems like these be secure in a trustworthy way is going to be a huge challenge as more and more critical devices are connected to the Internet.

No way a self driving car can rely on Internet access to "perform basic driving functions". Lag and connection failures would kill people. They might need Internet access for updates, in which case, there should be a physical switch that connects the net and disables the engine.

An air gap is hardly a solution for traffic information the route planner HAS to talk to the computer responsible for getting from A to B. In the same way that firewalls are no longer particularly relevant, air gaps appear to be flawed now too, the only way to solve any security issue is better code quality..

Re: Hackers Remotely Attack a Jeep on the Highway

#50

Post by maxerickson » Tue, Jul 21, 2015, 2:12 PM UTC

logfromblammo wrote: post #45

jon-wood wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote start I can see the reasoning for, but remote stop just seems to be asking for trouble.

Absolutely. But I can think of one very easy check that would solve many potentially serious problems. Disable remote operation of car hardware when a conscious human is detected at the manual controls. For some reason, this reminds me of Star Trek episodes where the crew has to transfer operation control of the Enterprise from the bridge down to engineering, or to another Starfleet ship. Even on a sci-fi television…

It's usually convenient to a plot to have characters do things.

In real life, people generally prefer not doing things.

Which isn't meant to excuse a problematic implementation like is seen in this article, I'm just not sure the writers were actually sweating the system details when they did that stuff.