Car Hacking & Data Collection
In less than a decade, amazing driver-assist mechanisms and must-have infotainment systems have swept into the dashboards of many popular car models for sale today. And we’re just at the start of this trend. Connectivity, apps, smartphone integration and autonomous driving are on an upward sweep taking us toward widespread public use of driverless vehicles, just a few years away.
As these developments unfold, the auto and tech industries, as well as US State and Federal Regulators, are scrambling to fully understand and address newfound safety and privacy concerns.
“The threats to the connected cars of today, and to the autonomous cars of the future, include not only the vehicles, but also the ecosystem they operate in,” said Stacy Janes, chief security architect of the connected transport division of Irdeto, a supplier of software anti-piracy systems.
Going forward, connected cars will increasingly make life-or-death decisions about physical objects and other digital systems they can sense nearby, while at the same time collecting and storing troves of monetizable operational and personal data.
The core security and privacy challenges are daunting. A viable level of trust must be established between multiple connected systems intensively collecting a tsunami of sensitive data.
Interestingly, it is the same threshold of trust that must be met to bring the budding Internet of Things economy to full fruition.
Redoubled Innovation
Modern cars rely on a growing bank of computing devices called electronic control units, or ECUs, linked together to control braking, acceleration, steering, engine performance, door locks, climate control, navigation and infotainment.
In 2003, a model of the Toyota Prius came along that featured automatic parallel parking assistance. It took Ford and BMW six years to come up with something similar. And then the pace of innovation shifted into high gear. Today, parking-assist, lane-guidance and collision-avoidance systems are commonplace. Level 5 vehicles, in which human driving is completely eliminated, may arrive as soon as 2020. In the meantime, computer-assisted controls are becoming more pervasive even as infotainment systems are being continually upgraded.
Safety First and Foremost
It has been more than three years since researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek remotely hacked their Jeep Cherokee as an experiment. Using a laptop and sitting 10 miles distant, the duo took control of the digital display screen, engaged the brakes, cut the transmission and killed the engine.Since the Jeep hack, there have been a number of instances of hackers overcoming the electronic door locks of parked cars. But hacks of moving vehicles has mainly been done by researchers in controlled settings.
Privacy Matters
USA Today has reported that rental-car companies routinely fail to delete personally identifiable information that renters type into infotainment systems. CBS News recently reported that carmakers have experimented with reselling blocks of location data to mapping vendors, stoking privacy advocates’ concerns about third parties moving to auction information collected from onboard cameras and sensors to the highest bidders.
Already, the move by 17 US States to restrict use of EDR-collected data is reinforcing criticism about the insurance industry leveraging data collected by connected vehicles in ways that might be unfair to individual citizens.
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