Autonomous Vehicles

[Hoofhearted]

(04-19-2018, 12:20 PM)Au165 Wrote: Hacked is a buzz word that gets thrown around a lot, but few understand it. The idea you are going to be able to remotely control someones car is kind of comical. Cars for the most part are self contained systems, some use satellite connections for GPS but satellite to system connections are about the most secure form of connection out there especially if using double blind encryption. Cars are already run almost completely by computers, if you could gain a connection to a car today you could already do this by feeding the car commands, the issue again is the system is a self contained system so only a direct connection to the car allows for this to happen. Now these cars adding WiFi into the car need to be careful that the Wifi system is segmented away from the controls system, if this is done there isn't really a threat there. Even so, fighter jets and military vehicles already used special encryption that have been successful to this point of not killing a bunch of people with their weapons due to takeovers. A lot of this technology is getting ported into staving off threats in autonomous cars.

The bigger issue is people trying to fool the sensors intentionally through devices to jam sensors but this wouldn't be as much of the mass attack dooms day you predict but rather more of a one off guy being a dick/ trying to commit crimes. They are using multiple systems to confirm information being fed to the car to try and minimize this, but it is a reasonable concern and one that constantly needs to be improved. The other way you could "hack" the car is on the component side by embedding malicious code in pieces of the system either in production or through an accessory that gets introduced into the contained environment. The thing about this is you'd need access to some sort of connection to feed it live time commands which as I stated before isn't really part of the current design of this generation of autonomous vehicles.

There are already much more critical networked systems that are prone to "hacking" than cars. As I said trying to take down a large portion of autonomous cars all at once isn't likely, however taking down an electrical grid or blowing up a gas pipe is far more likely yet I don't see people grand standing about it. 

I can guarantee you, as a network penetration tester, if it's connected to the internet, it can be hacked. Outside of controlling someone else's car, but knowing everything they do while also doing much more vague attacks like DDOS. They'll also know almost everything about you; SSN, where you work, what time you leave, where you stop for lunch, etc. Electrical and gas systems are generally not connected to a network. There's parts of the system that are accessible by the outside world, but the major functions are isolated from the internet.  You have to be actually on prem to do this. Hacking into jets is almost impossible because of the same reason: no internet connection. I am not sure they can do this with autonomous vehicles. They'd almost certainly need a way to spread information about traffic patterns, behaviors, etc, etc.