> My personal nightmare involves a vulnerability in a popular model of remotely connected and semi-autonomous or autonomous vehicle.
The CAN bus is a fundamentally insecure system. Devices accept that you are the device ID you say you are. The only way for a device to vote you out is for it to see its forged ID go out on the bus and then trash the bus. Not remotely failsafe.
Increasingly vehicles are networked systems. Devices need to act like it - encrypt data between themselves and authenticate each other. Without subsystem-level access controls (should the head unit be talking to the brake controller?) there is just too much attack surface.
You can no longer be secure on a "friendly bus", this is now a mini-WAN as far as attack surface, and has been since wifi/bluetooth/cellular basebands were put on the bus. Firmware updates need to be cryptographically signed (or jailbreakable with a user-selectable root CA cert).
Everything else is vehicle manufacturers whistling past the graveyard. The CAN bus is dead, it passed away probably 10 years ago, it's just zombie companies who refuse to re-engineer appropriately when they can just ignore the problem instead (recalls don't happen right?). It's cheaper just to put the new head unit in.
The CAN bus is a fundamentally insecure system. Devices accept that you are the device ID you say you are. The only way for a device to vote you out is for it to see its forged ID go out on the bus and then trash the bus. Not remotely failsafe.
Increasingly vehicles are networked systems. Devices need to act like it - encrypt data between themselves and authenticate each other. Without subsystem-level access controls (should the head unit be talking to the brake controller?) there is just too much attack surface.
You can no longer be secure on a "friendly bus", this is now a mini-WAN as far as attack surface, and has been since wifi/bluetooth/cellular basebands were put on the bus. Firmware updates need to be cryptographically signed (or jailbreakable with a user-selectable root CA cert).
Everything else is vehicle manufacturers whistling past the graveyard. The CAN bus is dead, it passed away probably 10 years ago, it's just zombie companies who refuse to re-engineer appropriately when they can just ignore the problem instead (recalls don't happen right?). It's cheaper just to put the new head unit in.