The Dangers of the Hackable Car

So, this was pretty much the mainstay of my major papers during my last year in college. First, yeah, totally agree, it's a scary thing that cars are becoming this dependent on their computers, and networked to boot. You can do some scary stuff if you manage to take over a moving vehicle's systems.

Now. That said. What are the chances of it happening? Pretty slim. The biggest compromise risk is the physical hack... as in, the hacker plugs a laptop into the ODB-2 port and takes control of the car. Pretty damned obvious that someone's hacked your car when they are sitting right next to you. The next biggest hack risk comes from signals interception. The hacker still needs to be close to the car (or have a device installed somewhere nearby or on the car), and really, the only thing they can do is get information like tire sensor readouts. Not really all that useful.

The last one... and this one's the real danger... has two different vectors. The hacker needs to either a) compromise a vehicle operations database to get network IDs in order to download a malicious package or b) get a vehicle owner to insert a flash drive with a crafted package that masquerades as an update package but carries a malicious payload instead. The first could be used in an immediate takeover, the vehicle compromised while in operation and the hacker remotely controlling certain key operations... like power steering, braking, or acceleration. The later would be for any number of reasons... control of the vehicle in operation, theft, or... who knows. However, either of these are extremely difficult, and have never (that we know of) been accomplished outside of highly controlled simulations.

I'm a little worried about the smart cars, sure. But I'm actually more worried about what the producers are putting into the code themselves, more than I'm worried about external actors taking control of them.