Congress is Really Worried Hackers Will Attack Self-Driving Cars

[LJ Ellis]

Congress is Really Worried Hackers Will Attack Self-Driving Cars

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During a meeting between the Senate Commerce Committee and the head honchos of the self-driving car industry on Tuesday, one potential roadblock to a driverless future was discussed most of all: hackers.

"Imagine what would happen to autonomous vehicles to get hacked while they're out on the road -- one small defect could end up in a massive safety crisis," said Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.).

In response, Google pointed to the company's long history of successfully dealing with hackers as a way to calm fears in Congress.

"We have hundreds of people dedicated to cybersecurity," said Chris Urmson, the lead engineer in charge of Google's self-driving car program, "and what we've learned through that is it's a very dynamic space and it's important to be able to adapt."

The main point of contention during the meeting was whether government should be in charge of setting minimal safety standards in the self-driving car industry, particularly with regard to the threat of hackers. While Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.) said he didn't want government getting in the way of innovation, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) saw it differently.

Said Markey: "Clearly hackers are going to have the ability to break into these vehicles, and so the kinds of protections you build in can be voluntary - but if 10 companies do it and 10 don't, then those 10 are going to be identified by the hackers as the ones they're going to be playing games with out on the highways."

"And I just think we need minimal standards that every company is going to meet."

If you're counting down the days to when streets are filled with autonomous vehicles, perhaps the best news that came out of this meeting was the fact that there was little to no negative reaction by members of Congress to the recent accident involving a Google self-driving car and a bus [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/166839-Google-Self-Driving-Car-Crash-Reaction-Impact-Update].

Image: Michael Shick [https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Google_self_driving_car_at_the_Googleplex.jpg]

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[Nazulu]

So how do they react to crazy drivers? Will they avoid an accident anyway possible?

 

[Bad Jim]

Hackers eh? Now I may be talking crazy here, but have you ever thought of, you know, not connecting it to the internet? Internet connectivity isn't a legal requirement you know.

 

[Porygon-2000]

I swear they did an episode on CSI on something like this. It was an absolutely stupid episode.

Well, I suppose regulation have to come in to it somewhere. Just keeping the software offline should do it. Good to know lawmakers haven't descended into a blind panic YET.

 

[Bob_McMillan]

Considering that a lot of modern cars can be hacked already, I think self-driving cars dont add much to the risk.

 

[Level 7 Dragon]

Maybe they watched too much Ghost In The Shell where they do the dumbest thing I've ever seen and gives WiFi access to peoples brains.

To be honest, there were reasons to linking ones brain to the web. If you get in to a car accident, you will automatically call for help. If you pass away, your memories would be digitized and inserted into an automaton.

All the issues in the series stemmed from bad incription.

 

[Aeshi]

Considering that a lot of modern cars can be hacked already, I think self-driving cars dont add much to the risk.

I'm sorry, but that's like saying "Well I'm outside in a thunderstorm and I haven't been hit by lightning yet, so I should be fine climbing this radio tower in plate armour."

With a regular modern car a hacker can do what, cut your brakes? That's bad, but unless your brakes get cut right as you're in the middle of crashing it's unlikely to do anything that can't be countered by just pulling over and taking your foot off the accelerator.

Contrast that with a Self-driving car where our would be Hacker could feasibly have control over the steering, acceleration, GPS, everything. There aren't many scenarios where suddenly accelerating to 60mph and turning left wouldn't result in a crash.

 

[Callate]

With a regular modern car a hacker can do what, cut your brakes? That's bad, but unless your brakes get cut right as you're in the middle of crashing it's unlikely to do anything that can't be countered by just pulling over and taking your foot off the accelerator.

You might find this an interesting read:

"Hackers Remotely Kill a Jeep on the Highway- With Me in It"

Their code is an automaker?s nightmare: software that lets hackers send commands through the Jeep?s entertainment system to its dashboard functions, steering, brakes, and transmission, all from a laptop that may be across the country.

I'm hoping that Google- and whatever other companies get in on the "self driving car" game- are a hell of a lot smarter than Chrysler. Updating of a vehicle's software is something that should never be done wirelessly, and Internet-enabled systems on a car should be rigorously firewalled away from physical systems. The threat from a poorly-updated vehiclular software suite seems relatively minor compared to the threat of a genuinely malicious hacker- especially one who might have access to your GPS position and speed, and maybe even something like back-up cameras to be able to ascertain the worst possible time to throw a wrench in the works.

I agree with you that the threat from self-driving cars may be greater- a unified system designed from the top-down for overall vehicular control definitely seems like it has the potential for more substantial, and even orchestrated, harm. (Imagine what a series of self-driving vehicles could do on the same highway as a hazardous materials truck, say.) But the potential dangers of hacking vehicles currently on the road aren't trivial.

 

[Marik2]

There are other problems besides the hacking stuff

 

[Laughing Man]

At the very least automated cars need a strong mandatory manual override; as has been stated by earlier comments.

Small issue with this fact and it is actually an issue you can already see on the road right here and right now with features such as automated lights.

If you have a manual override then that requires the person who is going to override the vehicle to be fully aware at all times of what is going on around them. That in itself kind of removes the point of a self driving car since the whole point is that the person being driven has to be thinking about the situation on the road. The real issue though is the more you automate features the less people pay attention to those features, this is were we come back to features such as auto lights on modern vehicles.

Ever been driving in heavy rain and wondered why so many people have no lights on, auto lights. The number of people I ask to turn their car lights on and they come back with the answer, I dunno how they just come on automatically at night. This is just a small example of an automated features rendering people in capable of driving their own cars safely because they either fail to see that they have to turn the lights on in fog / rain or they incorrectly believe that the uber smart auto lights will do that for them.

The more you automate features the more you have to ensure that it is 100% safe because a side effect of automating is that the more you automate the less capable the person behind the wheel becomes to compensate when or if that automation fails.

The ideal circumstance would be a 100% automated vehicle being overseen by a fully competent driver, Google however have already stated that the purpose of these vehicles is to allow those that can't drive (i.e those that are not competent) the opportunity to be driven.

 

[CaitSeith]

Lots of cars already have devices that can be hacked remotely and potentially cause a massive road safety crisis. They idea that they are just starting to get worried is kinda hilarious.

 

[Bad Jim]

All the issues in the series stemmed from bad incription.

It wasn't that it was bad encryption, it was just that certain people had military-grade processors capable of brute-forcing the toughest encryption in a matter of seconds. Or at least, that's how it's explained in the remake series.

I seem to remember several high profile hacks were done by amateurs, who would not have had access to any secret tech. The real problem was that groups that really should have been totally on top of security were not. Batou getting hacked, for example, should not happen because Section 9 should be checking him for vulnerabilities and making him as hack proof as possible. Any real equivalent of Section 9 would see this as important.

 

[K12]

Hackers eh? Now I may be talking crazy here, but have you ever thought of, you know, not connecting it to the internet? Internet connectivity isn't a legal requirement you know.

It would need to have connectivity to some kind of network to link with satellites and so forth wouldn't it?

It might be possible to partition the computing so that hackers could only screw up the car's route rather than steer them into oncoming traffic or something like that. This might not be a problem at all and I have no doubt that the politicians are basing these fears off "hollywood hacking" rather than real world threats but it's still worth thinking about... and doubtless Google have been.