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Comment by diafygi | Hacker News Reader

Back when I used to work at a chemical plant, we had two networks: one for regular corporate/internet access, and one for plant control. The later was physically isolated from the former, which is why scenarios like Die Hard 4 are so hilarious. You can't hack a plant control system from outside because that network is physically isolated.

Anyway, I hope this same practice is used in this standard, where critical control systems are physically isolated from these external communication systems.

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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.

I suppose. Things like Stuxnet require government-scale resources, though, so I'm not sure you have to worry about that kind of attack as much for V2V standards.

  >>I'm not sure you have to worry about that kind of attack as much for V2V standards.

Because disrupting the transportation system of an entire country isn't something a government would be interested in?

Stuxnet happened via thumbdrive. The air gap was already there. (and failed)

That was the point. GP said, "You can't hack a plant control system from outside because that network is physically isolated." What happened in Iran proves you can (or more strictly, that systems don't remain perfectly physically isolated even with an air gap).

Ah, I read that as "Iran didn't have an isolated system", in that they for some reason had a lapse of judgement.

Like a "See, the government even makes massive, obvious mistakes" type of comment.

"We've already seen the security services using hacked cars as lethal weapons to kill journalists"

What is this in reference to?

I believe he may be referring to the death of Michael Hastings.

See here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_(journalist)

I presume this is a reference to Michael Hastings - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Hastings_%28journalist%...

Conspiracy theory slip in of the week. 'Not only did the gpvernment totally kill him, they did it with a method no one has yet shown is even technically possible'.

It has been shown before. Here you go: https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/sec11/tech/full_papers/...

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.

Hmm, I guess I'm remembering it wrong (I thought they were controlling stuff in a van or something). Luckily, the scenario would still be impossible since every gauge/pump/etc. has a hardcoded interlock that shuts it down if it goes past that limit. You physically can't over-pressurize a steam pipeline because the once the pressure gets above a certain point, the pump is hardcoded in its local circuit board to stop.

There were other good tech fails in the movie, though. My favorite is when they break into a secure NSA data storage facility and steal all its contents... in a portable hard drive.

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.

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 ;)

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

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.

They could, although it'd be needlessly elaborate compared to turning it off, or driving an old car without such functionality. I see more and more luxury cars have things like radar-based collision avoidance built in, which will probably become standard and eventually mandatory on other vehicles. So cars will have to distiguish between what another car is telling them and what their own senses indicate.

Also, but a fit farther down the line, even if a vehicle is falsely sending 'I'm slowing down and driving totally safely, nothing to see here!' to other vehicles, if that message is inconsistent with the vehicle's telemetry (approaching rapidly), other cars are going to know there's something amiss.

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