Or, you know, having an A/B boot partition scheme with a watchdog. Things that have been around for decades at this point.
Disclaimer: Former Googler, Worked closely with Automotive.
Maybe they've got a test fleet, but it accepts code signed with the test build key.
Maybe they've got a watchdog timer, but it doesn't get configured until later in the boot process.
Maybe they've got A/B boot partitions, but trouble counting their boot attempts - maybe they don't have any writable storage that early in the boot process.
I wouldn't be surprised if, as a newer company, they'd made a 'Minimum Viable Product' secure boot setup & release procedure, and the auto-fallback and fat-finger-protection were waiting to get to the top of the backlog.
> Maybe they've got a test fleet, but it accepts code signed with the test build key.
Polestar solves this by only delivering signed updates to their vehicles. The vehicle headunit will refuse to flash a partition that isn't signed by the private key held by Polestar. Pulls double duty to prevent someone from flashing a malicious update, as well as corruption detection.
> Maybe they've got a watchdog timer, but it doesn't get configured until later in the boot process.
Based on what the Rivian reports are showing (Speedometer, cameras, safety systems are working), they likely are running their infotainment as a "virtual machine" within their systems. Again, something that Polestar does.
Implementation of a watchdog with a "sub-system" like this is relatively braindead simple.
> Maybe they've got A/B boot partitions, but trouble counting their boot attempts - maybe they don't have any writable storage that early in the boot process.
Generally, A/B partitioning is part of the bootloader, the first program that executes after the reset (on many modern processors) pin is released. This also leads to reboot counters and such being stored as part of the NVRAM that is available at boot.
Opinion: Maybe I'm biased, but maybe if you can't develop something yourself, there's reason for you to get an off the shelf option that handles a lot of these things.
Disclaimer: Former Googler, Worked closely with Automotive.
Observation: "[if you write buggy software], there's reason for you to get an off the shelf option"
Question: Are you saying if they used Android Automotive this could never have happened?
Reference: similar event for Android, last week: https://linustechtips.com/topic/1538248-pixel-phones-using-m...
Disclaimer: Former Googler, did not Work closely with Automotive, Worked closely with Android.
In this particular case, there's nothing particularly unique that Rivian is doing with their Infotainment system that couldn't already be handled by an incumbent in the space, (Android Automotive, QNX, etc.) especially given how modular the systems themselves are.
As State Farm says, "We know a thing or two because we've seen a thing or two".
That's Farmers, delivered by J.K. Simmons, not State Farm. State Farm is Jake, in his khakis.
They're garbage when it comes to their mobile app and some of the controls on the infotainment system.
> sometimes the HUD doesn't work(it's 50/50 if it will turn on).
You should definitely reach out to Hertz and ask for a car swap. Sounds like there's a bad connection between the display and the IHU. Both screens are operated by the same system, so it's unlikely to be a software failure.
Move over, Microsoft, I think I've found an update policy I hate even more...
As that was during a client emergency, I had a very happy client that day.
[0]: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/boeing-aerospace/faa-o...
All the controls related to driving are available. You can use turn signals, wipers, change lights, honk, shift gears, etc.
But you are correct that you don't see your speed during the reboot.
Also even on older Teslas lights are controlled exclusively via touchscreen.
Even the new stalkless cars have gear selectors.
And of course preventing people from modifying and controlling hardware that they own, having paid 6 figures for (in the case of the Polestar 3 anyway). But that's table stakes for embedded systems in this day and age. Security for me, not for thee.
You do not report a successful boot until and unless the entire system loads up successfully. You will definitely have writable storage by then.
Owners should have to bring the vehicle into a shop to have changes made, and they should be very rare.
This lazy, control freakery of the worst kind
Something very bad is going on happen and people will die before we realize that it is a stupid dangerous practice
There are a few different kinds of updates that can be applied, each with their own protective layers.
Infotainment updates, like what happened to Rivian aren't that dangerous. You lose "convienience features" like maps, air con, etc, but generally nothing that could kill you or someone else.
Then there's system updates, which is where danger noodle things happen. Automotive manufacturers are significantly more risk averse to updating these components, and generally, if _anything_ within the system looks wonky, it's an immediate revert.
If I, as a Polestar owner, wanted to get an update for my vehicle, the nearest service center is 1.5h away. If I lived in Montana (United States), it would be realistically impossible for me to update my car. Thus, if we want to enable competition within the markets, we shouldn't have regulations that force a new manufacturer to have a global network just to add CarPlay to a screen.
Also speedometer, which is hardly a convenience feature.
I don't know, I have car from 1991 so I'm just observing the trainwreck.
It’s stupid that we invented a way to not only remotely break an on/off switch but also a culture that rolls the dice on that until the inevitable happens.
Beyond that "infotainment" includes driver critical information - like the speedometer which, for many affected, means there's no working driver screen.
"Speedometer, charging, backup cameras, locks, lights, wipers, and turn signals are all still functional with the 2023.42 error."
It should be fine to push software updates out, as long as the correct safety and fallback procedures are in place. It simply has to be designed to handle failure and procedures need to be in place to mitigate risks.
It sounds like that wasn't the case here. Also, why wouldn't you have a small initial release pool when you have such a large potential for disruption?
What amazes me is that any grown up person thinks it is a good idea to update telephones as if they were software and not phones.
Or rather that it is a good idea to have phones that need updates? Either way, we're all one 1/2 assed push update to a fridge, vacuum, washing machine, phone or car away from a really annoying day.
There's really no excuse from Rivian on this, this is shoddy
That just felt like a massive product to build and maintain for what really could have been backed by AWS iam. GCP IAM if they really really needed hierarchy. I guess I'm not surprised at this outage.
Not a bug in the software itself.
That is independent of testing the software, but still a distribution issue.
This would not cause the updater to fail unless it verified the certs of all the binaries in the package, which most don't
It's easy to imagine a central SoC receiving the update, verifying its signature against a local key and then reprogramming some MCU over an internal interface. But then after resetting the MCU, you realize that the image you just flashed isn't compatible with the boot security keys burned into that MCU. It's not uncommon for a device performing the OTA update to not have access to the "source of truth" keys / certificates used to verify the updated image at boot time.
Not that this is a great excuse. If you add OTA updates to a product that has this design, you should really be confident in your recovery solution.
* "signed with the wrong cert" should mean the software package is rejected before it it is installed.
* software upgrades are tricky and there should be at least 2 versions available so that fallback to the previous is possible and automatic in case of issues.
Or is multiple signed packages and one is wrong.
Or the test cars accept prod and test certs.
Or some combo of the above.
There are lots of ways this could have broken that doesn't amount to rivian not being able to write software
That being said, "signed wrong", including all your hypotheses, that results in a bricked unit is definitely a serious oversight in general.
This also might highlight why production tests should be run on exactly production units. No tweaks allowed.
Talking about those is much more interesting than just asserting that everything should be a certain way, without any consideration for real world constraints, like cost of units, etc.
It would be interesting if you could develop about what you mean by real world constraints and how cost of units affect what I wrote, which I did from real world experience.
You included nothing about how costs affect anything. You simply assert that you should always test prod on pristine production units.
There are plenty of times outside of software where production units cost millions or you can only produce them so quickly, or both, and where your extreme take would result in remarkable cost or a competitor eating your lunch.
Which is precisely why its not done, and in the real world tradeoffs are made between what really needs 100% assurance and not. Spending money or losing customers for 5 9s of reliability through testing when two are needed is not a best practice, and is often explicitly called out as such.
In the case of rivian, maintaining a significant fleet of expensive, pristine, exact customer spec (ie not debuggable) cars just to try to get 100% prod ota success assurance is unlikely to provide value vs getting 98% assurance and not doing that (by rough calculation, it stands at 98% after this incident).
In fact you are trying to spin what I wrote to an extreme to make your point.
By the way, it is not about 100% success assurance but assurance that failure does not brick the unit. This is an assurance that should be, and can be, close to 100%, indeed a good number of 9s because, obviously you cannot brick 2 cars out of 100 for every software upgrade!
They should have had further staging of the rollout (randomizing when it is offered to users).
The test vehicles accept test/prod signed versions
Regular vehicles only accept prod signed versions
They are otherwise identical.
The test vehicles were sent test signed versions
The prod vehicles were sent the exact same update, signed with test.
This would not be uncommon since the test vehicles probably occasionally run test releases for debugging.
Further, the update is probably multiple signed pieces, and the only part accidentally signed with test was likely infotainment software.
Or something like this.
It's hard to believe they wouldn't test sending badly signed updates, so i have to imagine it's a particularly weird badly signed update.
In other words, i would not assume they are idiots.
You could get this situation if the application code accepted signatures the bootloader does not though. I can imagine that accidentally occurring.
OTA is generally developed by tier 1, so this is probably a bug in the tier 1's code. (Samsung, Panasonic, Sony, etc are common tier 1s in this space.)
IE OTA is a signed package, inside package are also signed binaries. OTA itself is properly signed, a single binary (infotainment) is signed with wrong key.
While most OTA verifiers will verify the OTA signature (which this would pass), most don't verify the individual inside-package binary signatures at install time, only at runtime.
So, OTA update comes in, containing a bundle of software for different subsystems. It's sent to different subsystems. Then, those subsystems check integrity at startup, but one subsystem's bootloader isn't happy because the firmware looks to be invalid.
You can only prevent this if the OTA knows how to do equivalent verification for every subsystem in the car that checks integrity. (And, of course, even if you do this, there's other ways you can go wrong that aren't specific to integrity checks).
It seems silly to off the cuff assert that it is a bad process or only done by those who have no idea what they are doing.
Lots of ways to screw this up, especially in automotive where you're likely to be dealing with TI and their (in)secure boot.
I've solved this problem god only knows how many times now and I've rarely found an automotive board that doesn't introduce fun, new edge cases. OTA can't exceed x kilobytes of memory, the processor isn't fast enough to verify signatures and write the image in < x seconds, can't write the image to flash unless the signature is verified, but the image doesn't fit in RAM, the server delivering the update is 3+ networks away from the device receiving the update, etc.
Cars are a long solved problem, being around for over a century. Telephony and computing hardware and infrastructure today are in the realm of the ludicrously good compared to even just a few decades ago, even if we consider bottom of the barrel worst case scenarios. If software somehow can't work a solved problem using ludicrously good hardware, the programmers (and their managers) are the problem.
The rovers on Mars, the Voyager, these problems have been solved for a long time. The compute in a Tesla these days can probably run Crysis.
You can do this OTA to a Raspberry Pi running Nerves via remote SSH and it works really well. The Nerves runtime utilizes A/B partitions for OTA updates.
For a vehicle that costs $100k+ it shouldn't be hard to double or triple the budget for onboard compute considering it is vital to the operation of the entire vehicle.
A shockingly large part of my job is telling both that one team won't be getting what they want and to work it out among themselves. Rinse and repeat between dozens of boards because the relevant teams don't talk to each other and none of them read the "design requirements to ensure we don't have to tell you no" doc either. One time they didn't even tell us there was a board until the end of December, when delivery was scheduled for Feb.
Edit: Also, why the heck isn't the entertainment system completely air gapped from the software running the car?
> Edit: Also, why the heck isn't the entertainment system completely air gapped from the software running the car?
As for this, the entertainment system can control basically every feature of the car and is often the primary or only way to accomplish certain things. Even in much much dumber cars the infotainment is still part of the CAN bus and is able to interact with the rest of the vehicle.
Sorry, but things no longer work that way, and never will again. This is a good thing, as long as processes are improved to avoid situations like this one.
How do you figure. I can’t think of a single thing in my vehicle that could be improved by software. When I buy a car I’d prefer it was done.
My biggest issue with modern cars, and it seems this is spreading to other embedded systems than cars, is treating those as software: connect them to the web and run OTA updates everytime you need to fix a bug. That requires some form of inzernet cinnection, which requires regular security updates, which require OTA update capability. All that because, bluntly, software devs cannot be bothered with just finishing software running on non-connected hardware that just works, not can they be bothered following hardware development in case hardware is the main component, as in cars. And no, no car manufacturer is a software company, nor phone maker like Apple.
The proper way of fixing software bigs in automotive used to be, again thank you Tesla for breaking something that just worked, to recall the affected cars to a workshop to conduct the software update. Honestly, the only thing on a car that should be updated by the owner is maps for the GPS unit.
The less software in my car the better.
Sure, but if you are rolling out to 1% of users per hour, you detect the problem in a couple of hours and much fewer than 2% of users will have applied the update. This is a relatively small support problem.
While if you roll out to everyone at once, you'll detect the problem sooner (within an hour) but have 10x as many affected.
RVN IPO’d at $150/share. Now it’s trading at $16/share.
All of these indicators of poor leadership to me. No sustainability. Burning cash. Poor company outlook. Poor products.
[1] https://tfltruck.com/2023/10/rivian-financial-results-losses...
[2] https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/1/23581642/rivian-layoff-ev-...