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Comment by aetherson | Hacker News Reader

My parents had cars for a long time that you could steal by breaking the window and doing something moderately easy with a commonly available tool and the steering column. They never had their car stolen and if they did, their insurance would have replaced it. At a time when crime was higher in the US and it was significantly easier to fence cars and successfully live on illicitly obtained monies than it is today.

Given the above, convince me I should care about how hard it is to break into passive keyless entry cars?

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The difference is in how easy it is to scale an attack.

Once an attacker can remotely hack a single car, they can hack all cars that have an identical configuration, with little additional cost.

What happens then? Even if insurance companies could replace all affected cars simultaneously (very unlikely), they’d have to replace them with a model that isn’t affected.

Passive keyless entry is not remotely hackable, it's locally hackable, that's not scalable and besides which cars sold today (with very few exceptions) can not self drive, so even if you could remotely unlock it you'd still need someone local to drive away with it.

You’re of course right about passive keyless entry and perhaps the GP has that confused with other features that do require an internet connection.

Anyway, even if it isn’t autonomous, suppose a car has a smartphone app that allows you to turn on the heating before getting in. And then someone exploits that and gains control over the heating. They could then proceed to drain the batteries or the fuel tank by leaving it on over night, let’s say.

Not exactly a threat to national security, but still a major inconvenience.

if you did it on the day of an election and only targeted your opposition, it could have an impact. It's far-fetched, but just another scenario.

Genius!

Not sure it was confusion, but rather intended as an example of how "high end" features spread to the bottom of the market quickly, such that in a few years nearly all new cars may be internet-connected.

> You’re of course right about passive keyless entry and perhaps the GP has that confused with other features that do require an internet connection.

I did not confuse anything. I only mentioned passive keyless entry in a footnote, as an example of an insecure technology that you can't really avoid anymore. You still have a chance to avoid "connected car" features, but in my estimation the days are numbered for that.

Numerous internet connected cars are remotely hackable and you can take over engine controls, steering, breaking. This was performed on live highways multiple times. DOT investigated at least one of the incidents involving some SUV's.

> Once an attacker can remotely hack a single car, they can hack all cars that have an identical configuration, with little additional cost.

And do what with them? It's decently difficult to fence a single car, it's impossible to make millions of cars disappear.

If you'd read the article you'd see several examples. Drive them at 120mph into gas stations, for starters.

Let's get rid of gas stations, for starters!

Btw, the truck attack in the German market would've been a much larger scale if the truck's safety mechanism didn't trigger the emergency break.

Regardless, that Jeep hack sure proved a clusterf*ck of system design, and should be a cautionary tale.

The system design clusterfuck is what you always get, when you cram as much software as possible on as few ecus as possible.

You wouldnt buy a car that is safe- because bad security does not smell.

This hasn't been mentioned, so...

> They never had their car stolen and if they did, their insurance would have replaced it.

You'll be a fun thicket convincing your insurance your car was hacked. Especially if it turns out to be true. Nobody has rulebooks for that one yet.

If you have really good insurance, perhaps you'd end up driving a loaner for a few months.

You don't have to convince them it's hacked, you just have to convince them that your car is not where you left it and that you really don't know where it is. Which is all you would actually know, like with any case of auto theft.

> Given the above, convince me I should care about how hard it is to break into passive keyless entry cars?

I don't really care if you care or not, it's your car, but I care.

Also, the issue with passive keyless entry isn't just theft of the car itself, its more often theft of its contents. It makes break-ins much easier to do undetected.

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