Hackers will be able to hack your car

A group of computer scientists have become concerned that automotive computers are even less secure than personal computers, and have proved that they can hack into car computers and make changes while the car is being driven.

Researchers from the universities of Washington and California (San Diego) have shown that their fears about connecting automotive computers to the Internet, a phenomenon that will soon become common, can be hazardous to the health of the driver. The group says, “We demonstrate the ability to adversarially control a wide range of automotive functions and completely ignore driver input — including disabling the brakes, selectively braking individual wheels on demand, stopping the engine, and so on,” according to their report, an “Experimental Security Analysis of a Modern Automobile.”

According to a New York Times article, automotive designers have failed to adequately plan for the security of on-board vehicle computers. The computer scientists that performed the study proved their point using two versions of a late model car. They say, “Taken together, ubiquitous computer control, distributed internal connectivity, and telematics interfaces increasingly combine to provide an application software platform for external network access. There are thus ample reasons to reconsider the state of the vehicular computer security.”

In short, they were able to hack into the computers of the cars. The researchers were able to activate dozens of functions and almost all of them while the car was in motion. They say, “We noticed the extent to which automobiles were becoming computerized. We found ourselves thinking we should try to get in front of this before it suddenly becomes an issue.” To this end, the computer scientists are presenting their report at a computer security conference next week in Oakland, CA. Until this gets straightened out, maybe we should all consider taking the bus.

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