Unpopular opinion ahead. Having worked in the security industry for a few thousand years (computer years), I can say I would never own a car that can talk to the internet. I plan to move far away from cities very soon for this and several other reasons. People will argue about this and meanwhile the "impossible" will happen, repeatedly. I just replaced the engine and transmission in my non internet vehicle and hope to get another 500k miles.
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I hear you, I just bought a new car and internet connectivity was a deal-breaker for me. Part of the reason I was in the market was I wanted to make sure to get one before it was impossible [1].
The dealers don't know about the cars at this level of detail. I had to use these questions to pry the data out of them:
1. Is this a connected car? Can I unlock it or start the engines from my smartphone?
2. Is that feature an option or is the feature part of the base model?
3. Can I get the connected feature later? Would I have to bring the car in to get something installed or can you enable them from your computer?
#3 is a really important question. Subaru (and perhaps others) ship all their cars with the hardware for connectivity, but the actual feature requires a subscription. The car is always connected to the internet, because the dealer can start your subscription remotely, but the salesmen don't understand that implication. They're thinking solely in terms of features you're getting, not what hardware the car has.
[1] It's almost impossible now to buy a new car without passive keyless entry that isn't a bottom-tier economy model, despite the well documented security problems with many of those protocols.
My parents had cars for a long time that you could steal by breaking the window and doing something moderately easy with a commonly available tool and the steering column. They never had their car stolen and if they did, their insurance would have replaced it. At a time when crime was higher in the US and it was significantly easier to fence cars and successfully live on illicitly obtained monies than it is today.
Given the above, convince me I should care about how hard it is to break into passive keyless entry cars?
The difference is in how easy it is to scale an attack.
Once an attacker can remotely hack a single car, they can hack all cars that have an identical configuration, with little additional cost.
What happens then? Even if insurance companies could replace all affected cars simultaneously (very unlikely), they’d have to replace them with a model that isn’t affected.
Passive keyless entry is not remotely hackable, it's locally hackable, that's not scalable and besides which cars sold today (with very few exceptions) can not self drive, so even if you could remotely unlock it you'd still need someone local to drive away with it.
> Once an attacker can remotely hack a single car, they can hack all cars that have an identical configuration, with little additional cost.
And do what with them? It's decently difficult to fence a single car, it's impossible to make millions of cars disappear.
This hasn't been mentioned, so...
> They never had their car stolen and if they did, their insurance would have replaced it.
You'll be a fun thicket convincing your insurance your car was hacked. Especially if it turns out to be true. Nobody has rulebooks for that one yet.
If you have really good insurance, perhaps you'd end up driving a loaner for a few months.
> Given the above, convince me I should care about how hard it is to break into passive keyless entry cars?
I don't really care if you care or not, it's your car, but I care.
Also, the issue with passive keyless entry isn't just theft of the car itself, its more often theft of its contents. It makes break-ins much easier to do undetected.
What Make/Model/Years did you find that met your criteria?
I ended up getting a 2017 Honda Accord V6 with Sensing. I got everything that I wanted, but had to compromise and get passive keyless entry.
The Toyotas Camrys also seemed good, except I couldn't find a V6 to test drive and they didn't have Android Auto.
Just a note: I'm not super-paranoid about my car getting hacked. I didn't want a cellular modem because I know I won't use whatever features it enables, and I didn't want my car to be ransomed for a bitcoin. I didn't want passive keyless entry because it didn't seem like much of a convenience, and it weakens security against petty theft.
My criteria, in priority order:
Must haves:
* V6 engine
* No cellular modem
* No passive keyless entry (not really available anymore, so I had to drop it as a dealbreaker)
Nice to haves:
* Android Auto/Carplay
* Adaptive cruise control, etc.
Toyotas. Toyotas are really dumb cars with wheels and an engine. Granted they’ve got smarter recently but I like they haven’t gone too fancy. It’s still a dumb car that survives anything like a Nokia.
Your idea is sound, hopefully you have plans to service your car entirely by yourself?
From my personal experience, the service departments will happily download data from your car and sell it to the highest bidder. My case was simple: the dealer updated the mileage record in Carfax using the odometer reading from my warranty-provided oil change. The car is leased, so I'm 99% sure I had no way to opt-out.
Sounds innocent, but my insurance company was watching. They extrapolated the mileage and decided I would cross the 7,500 mi/yr threshold - which triggered a premium hike. Funny thing - I didn't exceed 7,500 miles that year, but they already have my money now.
What else could a dealer read off your non-internet connected car when you bring it in?
This is just my own methodology, but I ask the local police / sheriff who the most reliable mechanic is. I then validate the number of tattoos on their team members. They must have a lot of tattoos and they have to be grumpy and their shop must be in a state of disarray. If they meet my criteria, then I have them do the work I can not do myself. This usually works out to be much less costly than working with a car dealership.
This is just my own unorthodox methodology. Your mileage may vary.
This is a good method. My mechanic has giant WE THE PEOPLE and eagle tattoos, the shop's office is a disaster zone, and he does a hell of a great job at a reasonable price. Nice guy though, so he'd fail the grump test.
Extra credit if he has an ashtray in the waiting room that looks like a mariachi band made of taxidermied frogs.
(The best transmission shop I even saw.)
Woah. This comment deserves a blog post and its own thread on HN.
It's true. Same thing happened to me. Now the first question I ask a mechanic is "Do you sell data to Carfax?"
Heh. I want a self-driving car. But I don't want an Internet-connected self-driving car.
This trend of doing everything over the Internet for no good reason other than business model is growing from just ridiculous and user-hostile into something that's actually dangerous to people's lives.
Last I heard, Alphabet's solution to the problem of self-driving was a tying the cars very tightly to Google Maps - reliably using just camera and lidar to make driving decisions apparently still isn't sufficient for self-driving but having a map showing the logic of traffic flows makes the process much easier (quick googling seems to indicate many self-driving solutions are similar here).
Thus it is going to be hard to avoid a network connected car and it seems likely that network will be the Internet.
> Thus it is going to be hard to avoid a network connected car and it seems likely that network will be the Internet.
Well, I agree that maps as a second source of information can be important for autonomous vehicles. However, I don't understand why "map" would imply "network connected". Offline navigation systems with detailed maps have existed and still exist for more than twenty years now. I fear that the "offline autonomous vehicle" will solely fail to manifest because of business decisions (online being "more convenient" for both the end-user and the company), not because of technical limitations.
Well, sure keeping maps offline could allow the connection to not be constant but the maps would require very frequent updating since being out of date could have dangerous consequences, and the updating would be most easily done by network.
Edit: which is to say, maps aren't really secondary parts of current systems but more like "co-primary" parts. The cars aren't planning identify traffic lights where they don't expect them.
> Offline navigation systems with detailed maps have existed and still exist for more than twenty years now.
When a dashboard GPS is out of date, it's irritating. When your car's autonav system is out of date, your car is useless.
"map" doesn't imply "network connected". "Google" does.
In a similar way I want an assistant in my phone, but I don't want it to be internet connected either. It's going to know the most personal things about me so I want absolute discretion.
This mindset set me off writing my own. ;) It's been a lot of fun.
Well, that's the point of the article: "connected" is a spectrum, not a binary option. Iranian centrifuges weren't "connected", and yet the virus destroyed them.
Specifically, look in the article:
>First allow me to address what I think won't work:
>Trying to air gap autonomous devices.
I understand your concern but right now 30k Americans die in car accidents. Will (potentially) hackable self-driving cars be any more dangerous than today? If you're that concerned about being involved in a car crash it seems to me that you should never leave the house.
The issue isn't the 30k people dying in one set of crashes. It is the systemic issue caused if all of our transportation and shipping capacity went offline at the same time as all ICE refuel capacity in a nation was taken offline at the same time.
If that happens, car crashes aren't the problem - it's the widespread famine that follows in a week's time.
It's not even the tinfoil-hat issue, it's standard emergency issues. Think of the damage a hurricane does to wide swaths of coastal land. Think of being trapped in Napa last fall during the firestorms. Think of a bad blizzard or a lucky lightning bolt to the right transformer. At least once a year, I think there is a sizable portion of the US population, let alone world population, that needs unconnected emergency ready transport in under 2 days notice. Expecting people to pay $30k+ for a car and not have that baked-in is a no-go.
Potentially, yes. Instead of 30k spread across one year, the very possible opportunity for 30k in one mass-hack exists. I will defer to others to debate this. Perhaps financial regulators, safety departments, transportation regulators, insurance companies, etc. This is a very complex topic that would quickly turn into banter here. Everyone will have to decide for themselves the risk factors as it pertains to them.
> the very possible opportunity for 30k in one mass-hack exists
It's fortunate that terrorists are both very incompetent and very low in number. How else do you explain the fact that there's been exactly 1 very serious and successful foreign terror attack on US soil (the highest value target in the world) in the past 50-ish years?
Currently there's the very possible opportunity of a power grid/infrastructure attack that could kill tens of thousands. But nobody should be truly worried about it.
Terrorists just aren't that good at what they do. Why would they somehow be better at hacking cars than they are at anything else?
That's 30k potential deaths compared to 30k deaths right now, every year. If terrorist attacks on cars killed 20k/year it would still be much safer than our current situation. We should mandate that every vehicle death be broadcast on the front page of every national media outlet[1]; that might change our perceptions.
I contend that 40 years from now our grandchildren will be astounded that we got into such dangerous vehicles before self-driving cars.
[1] - I'm being facetious, of course.
> I understand your concern but right now 30k Americans die in car accidents.
And a few thousdand died on September 11th, nearly 20 years ago. The collective fear from that made the world a far worse place than the actual death toll. If there's a terrorist attack that targets internet connected cars, what do you think the collective reaction might be?
You'll have a much easier time not owning a car that can talk to the internet if you stay in the city. I currently walk, bike, and take public transit. I could not do that if I moved out of the city.
The cities are where all the autonomous weapons of mass destruction are.
So your options if you don't want a computerized car are:
- Live in the country and get really good at repairing standard transmission cars and dodging emissions inspections, or
- Live in the city and get really good at dodging in general (it's a city, you'll learn that skill anyhow)
Unpopular? Isn't this the take-away from the article?
I thought that the article taught me nothing new at all, but then realized it did: it taught me how little the issue is understood by the regulators.
I'd say that an attack like that is just a matter of time, if I didn't think that a mass-destruction scenario that leads to a legislative change wouldn't happen sooner due to a bug.
>I plan to move far away from cities very soon for this and several other reasons.
Are you comfortable with sharing your reasons? I feel similarly but do not have concrete plans quite yet.
Perhaps in another thread. I would derail this thread by extending the topic that much.
Would you do that? I am also interested.
What make and model is your vehicle? If it's newer than the mid 2000's it can probably talk to the internet.
My vehicle is ODB-II and can not talk to the internet. I was part of the OBD-III debates.
I'm sure you're aware of this, but for others, the ODB-II port generally connects to completely insecure internal networks - so anything that physically connects to it may compromise it.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/01/15/resea...
It seems OBD-III was never implemented.
Yes, but what car?