Automakers Aim to Drive Away Car Computer Hackers
Automakers Aim to Drive Away Car Computer Hackers
LOS ANGELES — Nov 24, 2014, 10:04 AM ET
By JUSTIN PRITCHARD Associated Press
Against the team of hackers, the poor car stood no
chance.
Meticulously overwhelming its computer networks, the
hackers showed that given time they would be able to pop the trunk and start
the windshield wipers, cut the brakes or lock them up, and even kill the
engine.
Their motives were not malicious. These hackers worked on
behalf of the U.S. military, which along with the auto industry is scrambling
to fortify the cyber defenses of commercially available cars before criminals
and even terrorists penetrate them.
"You're stepping into a rolling computer now,"
said Chris Valasek, who helped catapult car hacking into the public eye when he
and a partner revealed last year they had been able to control a 2010 Toyota
Prius and 2010 Ford Escape by plugging into a port used by mechanics.
These days, when Valasek isn't working his day job for a
computer security firm, he's seeing how Bluetooth might offer an entry point.
Automakers are betting heavily that consumers will want
not just the maps and music playlists of today but also Internet-enabled
vehicles that stream movies and the turn dictation into email. The federal
government wants to require cars to send each other electronic messages warning
of dangers on the road.
In these and other connections, hackers see opportunity.
There are no publicly known instances of a car being
commandeered outside staged tests. In those tests, hackers prevail.
One was the Defense Department-funded assault on a 2012
model American-made car, overseen by computer scientist Kathleen Fisher.
Hackers demonstrated they could create the electronic
equivalent of a skeleton key to unlock the car's networks. That may take
months, Fisher said, but from there it would be "pretty easy to package up
the smarts and make it available online, perhaps in a black-market type
situation."
The project's goal is more than just to plug
vulnerabilities it is to reconceive the most critical lines of computer code
that control the car in a way that could make them invulnerable to some of the
major known threats. The model code would be distributed to automakers, who
could adapt it to their needs. That should take a few more years.
The industry is participating and not waiting.
One major association representing brands including Honda
and Toyota is helping establish an "information sharing and analysis
center" patterned after efforts by big banks to try to thwart
cyberattacks.
"Before, when you designed something, you looked at
how might components fail," said Michael Cammisa, director of safety for
the Association of Global Automakers. "Now, you have to look at how would
somebody maliciously attack the vehicle."
The so-called Auto-ISAC will allow participating
companies to evaluate the credibility of threats and, in the event of an
attack, let one warn others so they could test their own systems. The effort
was announced this summer at the Cyberauto Challenge in Detroit, one of an
increasing number of programs focused on auto hacking. Several days later, in
China, organizers of a cybersecurity conference announced success in their
challenge to hack a Model S made by Tesla Motors.
Another American company, General Motors, has checked how
Boeing and defense companies create systems to repel hackers, according to Mark
Reuss, GM's executive vice president of global product development.
Cybersecurity is "one of the highest priority things
that we have," Reuss said. "We have got to make sure that our
customers are safe."
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