Driverless cars are far from immune to car hacking
Carmakers and tech titans are racing for the lead in the market for driverless cars. But are we coming in a bright future of effortless railing or are criminal hackers about to crash the party?
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W e have been pursuing the vision of accident-free driving for some time, and we are now making big, big steps towards the realisation of that. When it comes to autonomous cars, we have to be the very first, we cannot be a rapid follower."
Daimler AG’s chairman and CEO Dr Dieter Zetsche is a busy man, but he made sure he was around to personally talk up the latest Mercedes E-Class, the company’s "upper-medium" saloon, during its launch. Heading the list of eye-catching fresh technologies is Drive Pilot, which uses a stereo camera, radar sensors and a laptop-sized box of tricks hidden in the rear wing to drive the car autonomously. It can accelerate, brake, switch lane and come to a accomplish halt without any input from the wobbly human behind the wheel. The fresh E-Class also extends Merc’s "car-to-X communication" smartphone and Cloud-based infrastructure, sending information or warnings about traffic jams or accidents from similarly tooled cars further up the road.
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As someone who can’t abide rain-sensing wipers – how lazy do you have to be? – the prospect of the self-driving car fills me with existential fear. I’m no Luddite, but I love the challenge and responsibility of controlling a car myself. I also savour the atavistic thrill of the explosive chemical reaction that sits at the heart of internal combustion: utter electrification means its days are likely numbered, too. The automobile has long been hymned as a symbol of freedom, but it’s difficult to conjure Jack Kerouac out of a car that drives itself or imagine the late Chuck Berry pushing a button on his Tesla when there’s no particular place to go.
Cars? They’re far from immune
Yet driverless cars are one of the thickest prizes in global industry and not just because they suggest the tantalising prospect of diminished emissions and zero fatalities – who could argue against that? Tech titans Apple, Google and Uber are all staking out the territory, curiously anxious to annexe a business that offers meagre margins unless you’re at the very top of the tree. So why bother? Because as autonomous cars take hold, they will become the fresh hub: the "third place – to loosen, work and play", according to Daimler’s Dr Zetsche, inbetween your home and your office. A giant smartphone, in effect, and therefore a critical fulcrum for data acquisition.
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Given the stakes, the car industry has no intention of letting itself be outflanked the way the music business was in the early noughties. This is why every major automotive OEM has been rebranding itself as a technology company that specialises in mobility solutions, with self-driving cars at one end and vehicle management services at the other. It’s all to play for.
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Zetsche has a challenge on his forearms, however. According to a latest independent research report by Navigant, it’s the Ford Motor Company that’s blazing the trail. Parameters here include "vision, go-to market strategy, fucking partners and staying power"; Ford was duly ranked very first out of eighteen car and tech companies. The company’s chief technology officer, Raj Nair, noted, "Very first, integration is key. Our hardware and software platforms need to be integrated into an efficient, high-quality vehicle system. This is a elaborate task. All the various electrical and mechanical systems must talk to each other. Energy management must be optimised, as the computing system requires maximum efficiency. 2nd is manufacturing capability. Building the ‘car’ part of an autonomous car is no effortless task."
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BMW is also leaning hard on the fast-forward button. Having spent in excess of £2 billion on its "i" sub-brand, the excellent i3 city EV and i8 hybridised supercar have yet to yield the revenues the Munich-based giant was hoping for. BMW can afford to be patient. Both cars come with a suite of apps that support and monitor driver behaviour, usage and efficiency, and exemplify connectivity, a vital part of the marketing message for any fresh car. When a BMW contact confirmed to me that the i cars’ connectivity was underpinned by a fresh facility in Munich, I asked if I could visit to check out the server firepower for myself. BMW declined.
Not that you can blame them. As we accelerate towards this fully connected, electrified and autonomous automotive Nirvana, some big issues urgently need to be addressed. Data protection is one, privacy another. Then there is the not insignificant question of car hacking, a growing concern for automotive companies, especially against the rising tide of cybercrime. I spoke to David Emm, senior security researcher at Kaspersky Lab, one of the world’s leading IT security providers and antivirus specialists. Emm is mild-mannered, engaging and has the priceless capability to guide outsiders through what he refers to as the "malware ecosystem" without leaving the more intellectually impoverished floundering.
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Kaspersky Lab processes 310,000 fresh malicious files every day, of which only one per cent require manual intervention from an experienced. Even then, only a fraction of those are referred to the Global Research & Analysis Team. The worst and most famous are known as APTs, or advanced persistent threats. As I write, malware detection flow during an on-demand scan (ODS) – when the user selects "scan for viruses" on their machine, one of eight principal data sources Kaspersky tracks – indicates that there are Ten.7 million detections per 2nd, and the UK is presently the 18th most attacked country.
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Emm offers some reassurances: what he refers to as the "attack surface" might be growing at an exponential rate (leave behind online banking, think the internet of things) but most cybercriminals are opportunists, latter-day Dickensian pickpockets looking for an effortless win. Others are very specifically malicious and Kaspersky’s map of targeted cyberattacks makes for grimly compelling reading. You might have heard of Stuxnet, a weaponised computer worm allegedly created by a joint American-Israeli group in two thousand ten to disrupt and ruin centrifuges used to enrich uranium at the Natanz nuclear sophisticated in Iran. It’s widely regarded as the very first malware to target the military-industrial complicated. More recently, the Carbanak cybergang stole £1bn from one hundred financial institutions worldwide; there are hundreds of other xxx APTs.
We could do it anywhere, over the internet. It was like, holy f***, that’s a vehicle in the middle of the country. Car hacking got real right then – Charlie Miller
And cars? They’re far from immune. The highest profile hack so far occurred when cybersecurity researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek exploited a weakness in the head unit of their Jeep Cherokee’s multimedia system and the cellular network it was hooked up to before accessing the car’s CAN (controller area network) bus. This is the jumpy system that effectively unites the multitude of ECUs governing a modern car’s engine, transmission, chassis electronics, air conditioning. the lot. Even with an air gap – which separates the networked elements from the physical ones, supposedly safeguarding them – Miller and Valasek were able to break in and take control. "When I spotted we could do it anywhere, over the internet, I freaked out. I was frightened. It was like, holy f***, that’s a vehicle in the middle of the country. Car hacking got real right then."
Miller and Valasek might be guilty of showboating, but they’re not malicious. "You need to know what hackers are going to do next, how to mitigate it and how some mitigations don’t work, which is what we’ve shown," Miller avers. Mercedes’ R&D chief Ola Källenius confirmed to me that, "Cybersecurity has a very high priority and will be even more significant as you open up your electronic architecture for fully downloadable, over-the-air capability."
We expect that car manufacturers will have to go down the same road that banks have already taken with their applications