New-Tech Europe | December 2016 | Digital Edition

Figure 1. Smart car systems

The Jeep So this time, it was the Jeep. The short version of the story is that they discovered how to remotely compromise the vehicle, Wired magazine published the article, and a few days later Fiat Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles at a cost of perhaps $14B. But a lot of good came out of this since they released everything: the vulnerabilities, their code, and so on. Automotive hacking doesn't scale if it is just the two of them. The academic researchers published stuff without details, and were largely ignored. Charlie and Chris told Chrysler that they would publish in nine months, and as far as they could see, Chrysler did nothing. But once the Wired article came out, the recall happened within a week. Clearly, publishing everything was the approach that got people

knew if it was just that one car, or all models, all cars. In September 2012, Charlie and Chris got a DARPA Cyper Fast Track grant that gave them enough money to buy a car. They decided they wanted a car with automatic parking since then the steering would have to be controllable, too. And it had to be cheap. They got a Toyota Prius. Apparently it was the easiest sale ever for the dealership, since they didn't care about the color or the options. Provided it had automatic parking, they would take it. They rapidly discovered how to control the car once plugged into the OBD-II port. They could control the brakes, the windscreen wipers, the radio, and so on. Once again, nobody was impressed since they had physical access to the vehicle. It seemed that they would have to repeat everything.

protected the quickest. At this point, they could control a lot of the vehicle but only if it was moving slowly. There were interlocks in the car to stop, for example, trying to automatically park the car when going 50mph on the freeway. But then they got to the stage where they could control the vehicle at any speed. electronic features aka targets How does this happen? It came about historically. Lots of electrical stuff got added to cars. Eventually, the weight of the wiring harness was a big issue (it affects both cost and fuel economy) and the automotive industry came up with CAN bus, a network. It had no security since it was only used for trusted things talking to trusted things. Then cars started to get connectivity to the

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