This Time, Miller and Valasek Hack the Jeep at Speed | Hacker News Reader

This Time, Miller and Valasek Hack the Jeep at Speed

darkreading.com

24 pointsadamnemecek11 comments

As long as there's no possibility of a remote exploit, this actually seems pretty cool. You're telling me I can plug a computer into my jeep and automate things?

Maybe I want to have the car roll the windows down for a while if the interior temperature gets too high. Maybe I can get my own version of climate control by controlling the AC via the CAN bus. Or maybe I can use my dashcam and some CV software to automatically switch my high beams on and off for oncoming traffic. It's actually pretty exciting.

Isn't the hack supposed to expose the fact that there is a weakness and openness to attack? -- if they can hack a remote car any hacker could potentially do the same -- and then killing someone via remote hack would be a lot easier... we might start to see serial killers hiding behind the internet

Indeed. Sending CAN frames directly is essentially a remote privilege escalation (think sudo user with no password). One of the shining examples of this done properly is Tesla; they have a gateway that you can issue commands to over the internal network, but it alone issues the CAN commands. You cannot issue CAN commands directly.

https://youtu.be/KX_0c9R4Fng?t=38m40s

The problem is traditional vehicles are required to have an OBD-II port that supports CAN by law.

Do people who design these things end up making a lot of puns about CAN and CANNOT?

> During a recent test-drive on a country road outside St. Louis, their steering-wheel hack sent the Jeep into a muddy ditch, and they got stuck.

Guys, either get access to a track for testing or do this virtually. Tired of seeing them risk others' lives.

Here is the video[0] of their St. Louis country road test. You can evaluate the relative dangers to others accordingly.

[0] https://youtu.be/ONDSAMfNGP0

That looks mostly like danger to corn.

I wonder if he had held on to the wheel would he have been able to counteract the turning?

Honestly I don't care how remote it is. Maybe someplace in the southwest where they have effectively unlimited visibility, but as I grumbled about after the journalist PR stunt, they don't really know the possible outcomes of their tinkering.

Even in a non-hacking scenario there are plenty of weird edge cases that can arise in car computer systems. Catch any of John Hughes' talks about QuickCheck and he'll describe finding perverse bugs that would take a combination of specific inputs and could result in very negative outcomes for the driver.

They are also taking a bigger risk themselves by not using security equipment like helmets.

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