A Nightmare For #IntelliDrive ? Hackers Wirelessly Crash Car’s Computer At Highway Speeds
This is inevitable in the world of electronic data and what bothers me is the fact that it can be done with relatively cheap labor (total cost of $1500) and some good amount of graduate engineering research work. If such a thing were to happen in the world of talking cars (IntelliDrive), would it open up the possibility of creating “zombie” cars whose networks can be manipulated and controlled externally to create horrific crashes? Not sure but that is terrible to even think about. Whatever be the case, the designers of the modern cars (especially the ones designed for the IntelliDrive era) should take this possibility into account and come up with fool proof data security.
We’ve told you before about experiments to hack into the increasingly complicated programming in modern vehicles. How complicated? A typical luxury sedan will carry three miles of wiring, scores of processors and close to 100 million lines of software code, or roughly 20 times more than used in a F-35 Joint Strike Fighter.
Those previous experiments showed what could be done with a physical connection to a vehicle’s computer. The new work by teams from the University of South Carolina and Rutgers tried a different tack: spoofing the wireless sensors in wheels used by tire pressure monitoring systems, required in all new U.S. vehicles since 2008.
The researchers didn’t find a wide-open door so much as the security employed by a 1920s speakeasy: once they learned the secret knock, the unidentified test car’s controls let them in no questions asked. The team sent fake warning messages from 40 meters away, and in another experiment, got the test car to flash a warning that a tire had lost all pressure while beaming the signal from another car as both drove 68 mph.
Because each sensor uses a unique ID tag, it was also possible to track specific vehicles, in a way that would be far less noticeable than roadside cameras.
