Schneier on Security

1&1~=Umm • March 21, 2019 10:34 AM

There is of course a side issue to this, which is “legal defence”.

There are traffic zoning rules in some countries that differentiate “Parking” from other activities where you might have reason to stop a vehicle briefly such as picking people up, (un)loading stuff from/into the vehicle, or even pulling over to use a cell phone.

If you had stopped at such a place to carry out the alowed activity, then found you could not drive off, how would you be treated under law?

Most of the legislation alows for break downs and accidents where the vehicle has in effect become either not drivable or not safe to drive.

But appart from being inhibited the cell signal drop out the vehicle is perfectly drivable.

I guess at some point it will make it to court in these days of private contractors being given ‘incentives’ such as fill your quota or get fired.

1&1~=Umm • March 23, 2019 1:30 AM

@James @Tatütata:

“Yeah i also remember an older but similar article. They want to mess with cars without triggering the alarms”

Think back a little more to an underpass in Paris, the son of the owner of a famous London store and the ex-wife of the heir to the British throne chased dangerously by men on motorcycles and a mysterious little white car. Suddenly something happens the saloon car unexpectedly crashes all but one of the occupants dies one apparently very mysteriously after having got out of the saloon with just minor cuts and bruises.

Strange stories appear in the media questioning what the white car did and was it an assasination carried out by the UK MI6 using a technology that disrupted the saloon cars electronics, all carried out on behalf of a senior British Royal. The story got repeated all around the world, made worse by different ‘official news’ about the driver first sobet, then drunk either way not alive to defend himself.

It would sound like a fantasy if it had not happened, and one UK Red Top Newspaper carried on with variations of the story for years.

Now just a few decades later we have the equivalents of MI6 very specifically developing software that could do the very thing that was once we assume a conspiracy theory…

Kind of proving ‘If physics allows then somebody will do it’ and we know the physics most certainly works in the notion of ‘connected cars’.

I remember when ‘wireless tyre preasure sensors’ were talked about for ‘automatic tracking’ as a way to implement ‘road tolls’ some people brought up the subject of ‘hacking’ via that RF port. Various people churned out the ‘it’s all issolated’ stories but it was not strictly true as messages ended up on a central control bus/network. Some who knew about such things started to wonder what would happen if you overloaded the receivers in a Denial of Service Attack, or put false readings into the receivers… But when the questions were asked of answers there were none, not even acknowledgment, just the strange silences of static on an old TV screen or tumbleweeds blowing through a dessert town long long deserted to the vagaries of entropy that is the dry wind, burning days and freezing nights.

Of the two questions, I knew the first was one not just of bus bandwidth but delays due to peak loads, a problem that comes up with Real Time Operating Systems (RTOS) from time to time. Especially when talking about contention beyween short response times for breaking systems and fixed time intervals for audio or other fixed rate low delay systems which can not have large buffers such as two way conversations. This is still an open question in many ways but is generaly dealt with –but often baddly– by prioritization.

The second question interested me more, because many engineers are overly trusting in naive ways, they just don’t ‘think hinky’. They spend their lives creating, and thinking ‘how could I flup this up’ is not generaly a speciality they have, even though they might be good at ‘what if’ for safety testing.

It takes a more seasond and worldly wise mind to be what feels like being paranoid but is actually a realisation that some people realy will do such things without qualms and then go home and hug their children and walk the dog. It took the Ed Snowden revelations to show the majority of people that such evil arises from the pure banality of doing a nine-to-five job with good health care and pension paid for by the tax payers and a top secret clearance in the NSA et all.

Thus on one side you have the aspiring engineer who want’s to make the world a better place within the constraints managment allow. So they design a system that would deal correctly with a catastrophic failure such as a tyre blowing out at 250kph on an autobahn. They test it in ‘real world’ scenarios and it’s seen as good and it goes into production. But do they test for ten or twenty blank faced banalities in the Intelligence Community who get paid to work out impossible sequences of values that will actually cause the vehicle to swerve and flip tumble and role?

I think most here are sufficiently jaundiced enough to realise the answer to that…