SILICON
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2
Silicon Chip
Editorial Viewpoint
Autonomous vehicles will need to
be very secure
Billions of dollars are currently being spent in an
attempt to create passenger vehicles which can drive
themselves on public roads. Some of these are already
being trialled in Australia and in other countries.
Furthermore, a number of recent articles have suggested that these autonomous vehicles will need to be
networked in order to operate efficiently.
No doubt many of them will be in communication with their manufacturers
or operators via mobile phone networks, in the same way that the Nissan
Leaf and Tesla vehicles “phone home” for software updates, battery monitoring and so on.
But this creates a huge problem if the security isn’t 100% foolproof. Hackers
could easily steal your car by simply telling it to drive itself away. Worse, people could be kidnapped by being locked in their moving vehicles while they
are redirected to a new destination or even held ransom with the threat of being driven off a cliff!
And let’s not even think about the terrorism implications of any security
holes in autonomous vehicles, especially if they become known when there
is already a large fleet of vehicles on the roads.
You may think this is only a theoretical risk but security researchers have
already demonstrated remotely taking control of a vehicle and it wasn’t even
an autonomous one. It was just an ordinary Jeep with a flaw in the security of
its entertainment system. For details, see: www.wired.com/2015/07/hackersremotely-kill-jeep-highway
Almost unbelievably, this was connected with the vehicle control systems
in such a way that a hacker with access to the entertainment system could
cause the vehicle to crash.
Nor was this an isolated incident; commercial aircraft have been found to
have large security flaws, allowing passengers to gain access to critical flight
computers through their movie screens! Unbelievable! See: www.wired.
com/2015/05/feds-say-banned-researcher-commandeered-plane
Pretty much every day now, we hear about the latest security flaw. Recently,
a huge problem with WiFi encryption was discovered, even though we’re
now on the third or fourth different scheme as each one attempts to provide
better security. More recently, it was discovered that a macOS update allowed
anyone with access to a computer to get administrator access with just a few
mouse clicks.
Frustratingly, many of these security flaws turn out to be dumb mistakes, of
the kind that an experienced engineer or programmer should not make. Who
thinks it’s a good idea (or even necessary) for the entertainment system on an
aircraft to share any commonality with the avionics? Why do we still have
security software and operating systems with rookie errors like buffer overflows?
This will all have to be well and truly addressed before we can trust
autonomous vehicles with our lives. The software will also need to be able
to cope gracefully with GPS jamming/spoofing, infrastructure failures (network outages, power outages), road marking vandalism and other non-hacking
activities which could deliberately or accidentally cause a self-driving vehicle to become confused or lost.
While I’ve no doubt working on one of these projects would be exciting, it
must also be daunting, knowing all the challenges which must be overcome
for the technology to come to fruition. They must be overcome, otherwise
no one will be safe from rogue vehicles which could even deliberately smash
into your home or chase you along the foot path.
Are you worried? You should be.
Nicholas Vinen
Celebrating 30 Years
siliconchip.com.au
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