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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

Can you imagine the havok when terrorists figure out they can program cars to hunt and kill pedestrians in crowded spaces? Currently the terrorist needs to drive the vehicle, which makes it a suicide mission. How much more deadly would it be if it was reduced to just the cost of the car and a low chance of getting caught? How can we defend against this?

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You can't. It's not that hard to make a controller that lets you physically turn the wheel using an RC remote, it's just a matter of attaching a servo to some cords pulling it (there's a guide on Instructables).

The reason terrorists don't do that has nothing to do with being hard.

> It's not that hard to make a controller that lets you physically turn the wheel using an RC remote

> The reason terrorists don't do that has nothing to do with being hard.

This is false. Remote-controlled VBIEDs are absolutely a thing

Um.... reread that comment. He's saying that VBIEDs are totally possible, and that this example of CAN Bus control isn't going to cause a new era of terrorist actions, because it's just as easy to do it with servos and/or ropes and cables.

What he's saying is not false.

What he's saying is that terrorists are doing it. Not that it's a potential thing, but that there are war zones where it is happening.

There was a problem in Edmonton ~10 years ago, where criminals would steal a car to get part way home in the winter. Then, they would convert it to a land missile, and launching it across a parking lot, into a mall, in the middle of the night.

Their solution was much simpler: secure the wheel using the seatbelts, jam a big snowball on the accelerator, and use a stick to nudge the transmission from neutral to drive.

You can already do that. How do you think stunt cars work?

just throw in a off the shelf servo to control the steering wheel and two more to run the brakes and gas. Throw in a off the shelf RC controller and you got yourself a giant RC car.

Probably faster than trying to hack a car when you got a perfectly good no authentication interface.

I'm more concerned about the concurrent trends for (a) remotely accessible systems in vehicles, for communication or otherwise, and (b) critical vehicle systems being connected via relatively insecure internal networking to each other and to something remotely accessible.

Put another way, it's not a hostile actor remotely controlling their own vehicle that worries me the most, it's the potential for a hostile actor to identify a vulnerability that lets them remotely control many other people's vehicles simultaneously.

It's also the lack of any way for even a relatively discerning customer looking for a new car to determine how likely any potential purchase is to be vulnerable to such an attack and how likely the manufacturer would be to anticipate and/or respond to such a vulnerability.

Given the generally awful attitude of the auto industry to safety and generally poor processes for handling even recalls for widespread and acknowledged mechanical failures, buying a new car is not looking like a happy experience any time soon.

There are an infinite number of ways that "terrorists can kill people". Remote control cars is only one of them and probably nowhere near the top of the list.

We defend against killer-remote-control-cars like we defend against all forms of terrorism: plain old police and intelligence work to snatch the perps before they have a chance to strike.

I'd argue that a lot of terrorists don't care. They want to do it themselves, die in the process and be glorified by their own. Otherwise they would probably just hide bombs somewhere to detonate them instead of strapping them onto themselves.

Well, humans are capable of improvising better than something automated or pre-positioned. That's the biggest reason. Second, for the terrorist organization itself, people are probably close to free assets (you just brainwash a few more), whereas spending a lot of R&D on developing an automated explosive delivery system and then continuing to patch vulnerabilities in it that governments would use to neutralize it would cost exponentially more.

tl;dr: If you don't care about the sanctity of life, humans are cheap.

Ransomeware devs on the other hand...

I have a hard time imagining self-driving cars merely negotiating the traffic I drive in each day much less deal with the myriad foreign policy and security issues that have led us to this point in time. Imagine the lawsuits if it can ever be proved that a murder was committed by someone hacking an automobile--and I do suspect it has already happened. The drive-by-wire gas pedal and shifter in my car cause me concern. We need better low-tech kill switches and backup mechanisms and way less reliance on fancy tech.

Also, there is no connection between "hacking" the CAN bus in today's cars and doing anything like providing access to adjust the A/C blower level in some future self-driving livery mobile. Why anyone would think there would be even the remotest connection between how CAN bus works today and how some future consumer-oriented interface would work demonstrates dangerous naviete.

The self driving car doesn't need to be perfect, it needs to be better than humans. That is a much lower bar. Self driving cars have already demonstrated their ability to handle traffic better than humans, but there are other situations where they are much worse.

Yeah, that's the problem. It's easier to be better than humans 95% of the time, but really hard for the next 4% and close to impossible for the last 1.

The issue is not even with self-driving, this concerns any "connected" car. Remember the chrome box? (a device from the ancient era of phreaking, allowing to control traffic lights - some of them had an external input only protected by obfuscation, intended for prioritizing emergency vehicles) Is it so hard to imagine an external controller for all the other networked cars out there? (Remember, there are many ways a modern car is networked, some of them wireless - the FM radio is plugged into a CAN, and has digital data band; how does that sound?) Full control not necessary - just annoy the driver sufficiently to make them get out of the road (e.g. full throttle AC plus force hazard lights on).

The way we always defend a network--authentication and encryption.

If your CAN nodes are all authenticated to one another, it's a lot harder to hack.

The downside is that they're a lot harder to hack, in the good sense of the term.

>If your CAN nodes are all authenticated to one another, it's a lot harder to hack.

The problem with that is now how do you do the legitimate good things you want to do? Of course, these kinds of locks usually have their own problems and usually only keep "honest folks" out.

John Deere would love it though.

A car could be self-driven while not connecting to any external networks. It still can get fresh traffic or weather data, but with those, you can't take over a car to make it a weapon.

As long as there's no parsing bugs in the traffic data module or the weather display that can be leveraged into an exploit, ala CVE-2012-1457 https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvename.cgi?name=CVE-2012-1457

Think Reflected XSS: weaponized string hidden in map data (road name even) in advance, is unwittingly integrated into offline map, triggers when a self-driving car tries to parse the data for that road segment, using a vulnerable library. Antyhing that uses network-contributed data is network-connected, even if the link is currently inactive (Case in point: Stuxnet).

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