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Charlie Miller gave a keynote at ARM
TechCon on automotive security. He
is regarded as one of the world's
most proficient hacker, although he
is one of the good guys (a white hat
in security parlance). He has a PhD,
worked for the NSA, and is currently
the senior security engineer at
Uber. He works alongside Chris
Valasek. You probably don't know
their names, but you may know
of their work. They were the two
engineers who took control of a
Wired journalist's Jeep, memorably
reported as Hackers Remotely Kill a
Jeep on the Highway—With Me in It.
Or watch the video:
Car Hacking History
Charlie said that car hacking started
around 2010. Some academic
researchers from University of
Washington and UCSD plugged a
device into the federally mandated
on-board diagnostic port (OBD-II
port) and could control the brakes,
the windscreen wipers, and so on.
They published their results under
the catchy title Experimental Security
Analysis of a Modern Automobile.
This was not well received by either
academia nor the car companies,
who all pointed out that if you have
physical access to the car (which
you need to plug something into
the OBD port) then of course you
can do bad stuff. You could cut the
brake lines, too.
So they took on that challenge.
The next year, they produced
another paper, even more catchily
titled Comprehensive Experimental
Analysis of Automotive Attack
Surfaces. This time they attacked
remotely and showed three ways to
do it. The first involved Bluetooth
(so was remote, but you had to be
nearby), one was using a CD with a
malicious MP3 track, and the most
important was through OnStar. They
could dial in from anywhere and
take control. They could dial up the
cellular modem in the car with a real
phone, get the audio modulation
tones, and then provide their own
data. Charlies said it was "right out
of an 80s TV show."
Charlie and Chris Get
Interested
Charlie started to get interested in
this. The academics had basically
done everything but not given any
technical details about what bugs
they were exploiting, or even what
kind of car it was (a Malibu). Nobody
Automotive Security: A Hacker's Eye View
Paul McLellan, Cadence
40 l New-Tech Magazine Europe