Highway to hack: why we’re just at the beginning of the auto-hacking era

Imagine it’s 1995, and you’re about to put your company’s office on the Internet. Your security has been solid in the past—you’ve banned people from bringing floppies to work with games, you’ve installed virus scanners, and you run file server backups every night. So, you set up the Internet router and give everyone TCP/IP addresses. It’s not like you’re NASA or the Pentagon or something, so what could go wrong?

That, in essence, is the security posture of many modern automobiles—a network of sensors and controllers that have been tuned to perform flawlessly under normal use, with little more than a firewall (or in some cases, not even that) protecting it from attack once connected to the big, bad Internet world. This month at three separate security conferences, five sets of researchers presented proof-of-concept attacks on vehicles from multiple manufacturers plus an add-on device that spies on drivers for insurance companies, taking advantage of always-on cellular connectivity and other wireless vehicle communications to defeat security measures, gain access to vehicles, and—in three cases—gain access to the car’s internal network in a way that could take remote control of the vehicle in frightening ways.

While the automakers and telematics vendors with targeted products were largely receptive to this work—in most cases, they deployed fixes immediately that patched the attack paths found—not everything is happy in auto land. Not all of the vehicles that might be vulnerable (including vehicles equipped with the Mobile Devices telematics dongle) can be patched easily. Fiat Chrysler suffered a dramatic stock price drop when video of a Jeep Cherokee exploit (and information that the bug could affect more than a million vehicles) triggered a large-scale recall of Jeep and Dodge vehicles.