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Comment by relix | Hacker News Reader

Actually, I think there's a legal case for not having root on a car. It could mean you can disable safety measures - especially with regards to the battery, i.e. overcharging, temperature, ... - that might endanger you or others on the road.

Edit: downvoted for stating a valid point in a neutral tone? Stay classy HN...

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>It could mean you can disable safety measures

How is this any different from being able to open the hood on a conventional car? Or having a screw driver and socket wrench that fit the nuts/bots/screws on a conventional car?

It's funny what kind of hand wavy fearmongering rhetoric people engage in when computers are involved. Hackers are this generation's witches, and that's why we keep locking them up for trivial and harmless manipulations.

It's not any different from being able to do that to hardware. That's why cars have to meet certain standards in order to be legal for driving on public roads.

It seems likely to me that making certain changes to a Tesla through rooting would just mean the car would end up not being street legal.

It's not, but I'm pretty sure it's also illegal to disable your brakes and then drive your car on a public road.

And thus, when it comes to software modification, the only reasonable course of action is make the equivalent of opening the hood illegal?

And yet the right to disassemble and replace the brakes on my car is socially and legally accepted. Why is it suddenly "scary" to modify the software?

I guess thats overly dramatic. The big touchscreen (and I guess the only thing that actually runs a Linux) is called an infotainment system for a reason - it's absolutely non-critical to the operation of the vehicle. In fact, theres a hotkey on the steering wheel controls to reboot it :)

All the critical systems are controlled by embedded systems running either no operating system at all or realtime operating systems that have been formally verified to some degree.

But they're all wired together with CANBus and similar interconnections. I don't exactly remember the details, but some researchers were able to kill acceleration with a MP3 on a CD rom, which exploited a buffer overflow and then sent malicious commands on the CANbus.

"Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces", Checkoway et al.

http://www.autosec.org/publications.html

From the FAQ:

"We explore a number of other communications channels in our August 2011 paper "Comprehensive Experimental Analyses of Automotive Attack Surfaces", including long- and short-range wireless communications, the networked diagnostic tools used by automobile mechanics and the car's CD player."

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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