Fact or fiction?: Your car is hackable

by LARRY GREENEMEIER

At this week’s Symposium on Security for Asia Network (SyScan) in Singapore, security engineers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek will highlight how fellow car hackers can research automotive electronic control units (ECUs) without needing to buy and dismantle a car. The researchers have even rigged a go-cart rigged with ECUs for testing purposes. The vehicle pictured has rearview camera, satellite radio, Bluetooth, GPS navigation and power steering. PHOTO/Charlie Miller

When your home computer is hacked, the things at risk are your identity, finances and other digital assets. A cyber attack that can take control of your car—especially while you’re driving—raises the stakes considerably. As carmakers transform their vehicles into networked computers on wheels, concern has grown about hacker attacks on automobile systems and the seriousness of the threat.

That possibility is not good news for car companies that want to build interfaces into their vehicles so they can communicate with one another as well as sensors built into traffic signals, roads and other infrastructure. Automobiles have already become sophisticated networks controlled by dozens of computers—called electronic control units (ECUs)—that manage critical, real-time systems such as steering, air-bag deployment and braking as well as less critical components including the ignition, lights and “infotainment” console. Software, sometimes consisting of up to 100 million lines of code, tells these ECUs what to do and when to do it. Carmakers connect multiple ECUs together within the vehicle using an internal communications network known as a controller area network (CAN).

Car hackers
Miller and Valasek are perhaps best known for a presentation at last summer’s Defcon hacker conference in Las Vegas that described in detail how they used a MacBook to take control of ECUs in a Toyota Prius and a Ford Escape, both model year 2010. The researchers connected their laptop via a cable to each car’s data port to fool the vehicles’ computers into taking any number of inappropriate actions while on the road—such as braking suddenly at high speed and steering into oncoming traffic.

Scientific American for more

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