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VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

cyberinsider.com

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Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#251

Post by fastasucan »

mulmen wrote: post #232
fastasucan wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If you’re out of key fob range do you really need to pre-heat the car? Yeah, that can save 15 minutes of scraping the windows for snow and ice in the morning and afternoon.

Sure that takes a lot of time but why would the car be out of fob range? If you care about 15 minutes of scraping snow why is the car parked out of fob range and also still in cell service somehow?

People hating having to scrape their car in the morning doesn't help them getting a parking spot closer to their work place or their home.

If they had a garage next to their house to park their car they wouldn't need either. However there are lots of situations where the car isn't close yet it need pre heating. For me this is driving the car to and from work in the winter, and certain one off situations (going home from the hospital, picking up the car after avriving at the train station).

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#253

Post by _yb2s »

cherryteastain wrote: post #97

We need a way to disable vehicle telemetry. No, a software switch is not enough. We need to be able to physically unplug the cellular modem entirely and have the vehicle work with 100% functionality (barring features which inherently require cellular connectivity like turning the heating on remotely) Car manufacturers' features are mostly useless anyway thanks to Android Auto/Apple CarPlay

> We need a way to disable vehicle telemetry

It should have a standard UI for doing so, but if you are technically inclined it is usually trivial to do- pulling a fuse, or changing a setting over the OBD port.

However, you will lose useful features like advanced charging controls, and starting the HVAC remotely on EVs.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#254

Post by 0points »

surajrmal wrote: post #248
cherryteastain wrote: post #97

We need a way to disable vehicle telemetry. No, a software switch is not enough. We need to be able to physically unplug the cellular modem entirely and have the vehicle work with 100% functionality (barring features which inherently require cellular connectivity like turning the heating on remotely) Car manufacturers' features are mostly useless anyway thanks to Android Auto/Apple CarPlay

It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an…

> Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them.

Honest question, what is a good reason to do this?

My Logitech software sends telemetry to Logitech.

My VW apparantly sends my GPS coordinates.

How is this useful for improving their hardware?

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#255

Post by effdee »

surajrmal wrote: post #248
cherryteastain wrote: post #97

We need a way to disable vehicle telemetry. No, a software switch is not enough. We need to be able to physically unplug the cellular modem entirely and have the vehicle work with 100% functionality (barring features which inherently require cellular connectivity like turning the heating on remotely) Car manufacturers' features are mostly useless anyway thanks to Android Auto/Apple CarPlay

It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an…

> I'd rather focus on standardizing a transparent and privacy safe way to gather these metrics. Consumers would know what metrics are collected and there would be guarantees that privacy is kept.

I'd rather see laws to have it disabled by default. People who don't mind can then opt-in again.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#256

Post by ta12653421 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #199
whimsicalism wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

modern cars are unfortunately much safer

To a large extent this depends on the car and depends what you mean by "old". Modern cars vs. 1970s cars? The older cars are completely hopeless. Modern cars vs. 15 year old cars? The older cars may have had things like ABS and side airbags as options rather than as standard, but you can find one that has them that doesn't have cellular telemetry.

IIRC, there is for Europe a directive which requires 60/65% (?) of the force within a crash must be absorbed by the frame/chassis. It came into action around 2015, IIRC.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#257

Post by surajrmal »

0points wrote: post #254
surajrmal wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an…

> Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. Honest question, what is a good reason to do this? My Logitech software sends telemetry to Logitech. My VW apparantly sends my GPS coordinates. How is this useful for improving their hardware?

I'm not sure I can defend all choices various vendors make, but there are plenty of signals that are helpful. Precise gps coordinates seem unnecessary, but some sort of region based information can help correlate whether there is a particular problem that might happen at far higher rates in hilly terrain or specific humidity levels. Users also often use products in a way that doesn't line up with how the product owner thinke it should be used. Metrics don't replace interviewing people but it might help you craft the right questions. In the case of a Logitech mouse, it might be useful to understand if people are actually using those extra features you've added or maybe it's worth removing in a future version.

The most obvious metric that everyone wants to know is failure or crash rates. After a software update it's always good to know if those rates went up. Those errors may be recoverable, but it's good to try and understand them to improve reliability. Maybe pairing android auto with specific phone models is more problematic, or maybe trying to pair Bluetooth is particularly bad under specific conditions like high thermals in warmer climates. It's pretty difficult to interop testing with all possible parties in all conditions.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#258

Post by amluto »

mulmen wrote: post #166
amluto wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This argument seems like a fairly extreme example of the perfect being the enemy of the good. Sure, it would require a more advanced system for VW to prevent themselves from silently compromising their own system to learn everyone’s location. But the design I outlined will prevent a passive compromise of VW, and even possibly a court order, from learned everyone’s location, and it prevents even an active and highly m…

"Shipping the private key" does not meet the bar for "good". You still need a way to establish trust in your key distribution and also implement the system correctly. The proper way to secure access to a physical thing you own is to only communicate directly with that thing.

This is ridiculous. It would take heroic effort for VW to prevent themselves from silently uploading malicious firmware to VW cars. There are ways to do this, but it’s also a separate problem from the problem that should actually be solved here.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#259

Post by amluto »

magicalhippo wrote: post #141
amluto wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What, exactly, makes it hard to get this to work reliably in the real world? The app already won’t work without a valid login session. The car is already sending a little blob of data to the mothership containing a location. If the communication to the mothership changes to having the mothership send a list of keys and the car encrypt its blob, that’s basically it. The total increase in communication needed is one ro…

The app and car will have intermittent connection to the internet. My car for example doesn't have reliable connection when it's parked in the garage, which is where I charge it. Your solution would add a lot of extra edge cases that needs to be considered. You have to ensure the updated key is reliably transferred to the mothership in a timely fashion, and subsequently that the key is reliably transferred to the car…

What edge cases? The app already can’t locate the car if the car hasn’t checked in recently enough.

Re: VW breach exposes location of 800k electric vehicles

#260

Post by carra »

surajrmal wrote: post #248
cherryteastain wrote: post #97

We need a way to disable vehicle telemetry. No, a software switch is not enough. We need to be able to physically unplug the cellular modem entirely and have the vehicle work with 100% functionality (barring features which inherently require cellular connectivity like turning the heating on remotely) Car manufacturers' features are mostly useless anyway thanks to Android Auto/Apple CarPlay

It's pretty much industry standard for all consumer products to deliver metrics back to home base. Honestly there are many good reasons to do so and it does result in finding real problems and solving them. While I understand the argument that we did fine in these products for decades without them, the complexity of the products was also a lot less back then. Finding issues via metrics from the production fleet is an…

Defending this because "it's industry standard" is no better than justifying any wrong practice because "it's always been done this way".
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