US plans to require inter-vehicle communication technology in new cars

For a govt mandated feature, FRAND rules would apply, so it wouldn't be any different than all of the patents Samsung or Nokia hold on tech like LTE (for instance)

Those are requirements because you share the road with others - if you opt out of anti-lock brakes you might slam into the side of my car and kill me. So personally, I'm quite glad these things exist.

Want to make a car to take out on a test track? Go crazy. Want to drive it on public roads? Follow rules.

What is needed is a standardized set of these required by law components, they should be mass produced and very cheap. Did I just find a niche - a hobbyist pack for car makers?

As far as I know my car (a 2011 Chevy Aveo) does not have anti-lock brakes. Wikipedia indicates that they are mandated in the EU but not the US.

My car does have a tire pressure monitoring system though. I believe it was also one of the last cars produced for the US without electronic stability control.

I've been thinking that would be possible with just a microphone (or a few) and DSP.

"The current methods of inter-vehicle communications used by emergency vehicles (loud ass sirens and flashy lights) are ridiculously error prone, and becoming less and less effective"

Yes, you could solve that problem with complex, interdependent systems that will fail in unpredictable ways.

Or you could just mandate better driver training and education which is the clear failure point here, at least in my experience.

My experience is both as a driver and as a firefighter who regularly drives a fire truck.

To get any network security right, you have to start with the assumption that each node is fully open to being controlled/modifiable by its end user, and that there is a non-negligable amount of unaccountable trolling nodes that will actively seek to disrupt the system. In the world of corporate embedded design and agency approvals, how likely do you think this is?

What's to prevent someone from modifying the firmware in their own car which either indirectly or directly causes destruction?

This by its very nature cannot be a closed network.

"At best, an air gap is a high-latency connection." -Ed Skoudis

My experience is different - I help develop systems like that and what I often see terrifies me. Yes the system may be on a different physical network, but almost always there is at least one point of entry i.e backup server, domain controller etc. And I can't believe how many times I worked in front of the computer that had usb storage turned off, but had a cd writer installed ;)

Did you miss the part in that Die Hard movie where they have to physically break into a power plant because the network is not accessible from the outside? http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0337978/synopsis?ref_=tt_stry_pl The third stage will be to take out the power grid; this cannot be done remotely but requires intervention at the actual physical plants.

Two points:

1. Tell that to Iran... They thought the same thing and look what happened to their centrifuges.

2. I hope so too, and it likely will be. Many current car designs already have a separation of interests, with things like engine control systems only giving "read only" access to entertainment systems and similar (so you can get diagnostic information without the entertainment system having the chance to alter engine settings).

Some cars have "over the air" updates which CAN update the engine control systems however, that can only happen when the engine is not running and they often use traditional digital signing to confirm the authenticity of updates.

I do suspect you'll see people try to exploit these V2V systems (e.g. next blackhat?). Let's hope they're designed with security in mind. We've already seen the security services using hacked cars as lethal weapons to kill journalists.

Where there is a will, there is a way. There will always be ways around an air gap.

The Iranians had their centrifuges isolated by an air gap. Until someone (cia? mossad?) dropped USB thumbdrives in the parking lot that contained stuxnet and people being curious plugged them into computers on the air gapped network to see what was on them.

Target theoretically had isolated the network that their cash registers where on, but someone mis-configured a VLAN and it was connected to the HVAC network which was vulnerable.

I don't think that is an excuse to not do some super cool shit regarding inter-vehicle networking, but you just have to be careful as hell. Based on how horrible most car's entertainment/gps systems are, I'm not sure I put a whole lot of trust in the auto manufacturers to put as much scrutiny on it as they should.

That's tame compared to what'd it'd be like most places, think XBox live but with grown-up insults.

I would imagine a stand alone unit with an warning indicator panel, that you could attach/install on dashboard

I think if you can't pay enough attention to avoid turning across oncoming traffic, you shouldn't be driving, warning gizmos or no.

I'll be the first. I'd be very concerned about this type of communication system and my vehicle. My concerns aren't limited to government surveillance, but that certainly is one. I'm also concerned about malware or other security vulnerabilities. I'm also concerned about the government "requiring it" and the related costs associated with it. It will certainly drive up costs to consumers.

Ah, finally. An Earnest Voice of reason.

Yes, I also believe this a great news. I can't want for the day for me to jump in the car from the bar drunk as hell and my car drives me home. But I also agree with the anti-government types in the respect that the government should not be forcing technology into law. I mean this not because the 'OH MY GOD THE GOVERNMENT IS SPYING ON ME'. But I mean in the way that then there is one a monopoly on the technology and how the law is written. If the law states 'contractor A' will supply the hardware, or that the law states 'must use bluetooth technology' or 'must use wifi or radio frequencies x,y, and z' I do have a problem with that. If anything it should be 'optional' because I don't want more features in my car. I also know plenty of people do NOT want this because they don't want all the 'features' and just want a car to get from point A to point B. Not only that. But this will also increase the cost of the car for development and hardware, etc.

This is actually one of the few reasons I wouldn't be totally against this kind of technology. (For security reasons, I think that putting software with open on the air connections into a 1-2+ ton metal machine powered by explosions that moves ridiculously fast is mostly a bad idea.) Particularly in America, even fairly 'bicycle friendly' cities can be pretty dangerous to ride a bike in, and often for design reasons that force bikers to either endanger themselves or put themselves in a place where cars will make dangerous maneuvers near them. (Example below) A system that you could attach to a bike that would basically give your bike a warning system for nearby cars (and them a warning system for bikes) would be fantastic. Another good thing about it would be that it could be used to give motorcycles the profile of a car, which would make riding them much less dangerous: no matter how safe a motorcycle rider you are, you're smaller than a car and that lower visibility can cause accidents.

The promised example: A common dangerous design for bikers in cities is bike lanes right up against a lane of parked cars. Depending on how fast a biker is going and the local terrain, someone opening up their door into the bike lane can be lethal: you might not have time to stop yourself, and your options might be to slam into the door and maybe a person getting out of the car or to swerve into traffic, both of which are very dangerous. The safest thing to do when that's the case is actually to ride in the car lane, but that has its own dangers: many cars will try to pass you by going part of the way or all of the way into the lane to the left of them, which might have oncoming traffic or traffic coming from behind that the drivers don't check for, which can lead to them swerving back towards you. That means that the most safe thing you can do for everyone in that situation is to ride dead center of the lane so that passing you by going only halfway into a lane isn't possible (since many car drivers seem to treat that kind of passing differently from an actual lane change), but car drivers absolutely hate that and will do all sorts of other dangerous things like following super close.

TrustPoint (where I work) is doing Crypto and PKI system research for it, and contributing to the V2V security specs. There's some really interesting technology being developed for both security and anonymity in M2M communication field. More info: http://www.trustpointinnovation.com/vehicle-to-vehicle/, http://www.trustpointinnovation.com/device-security/