I'm all for rooting my phones, media devices, gaming consoles...but I think I'd stop short of rooting my car. I think back to the Toyota electronic throttle control system bugs--we can hardly trust manufacturers to develop robust automotive software on their own, long before rooting and customization are thrown into the mix. The media system modded in this post _should_ be completely separate from the "brains" of the car, but that's still not a risk I would take.
If I recall correctly the part of the system this is running on is independant from anything important and only does media controls. It also speaks to the rest of the car over a network interface.
There have actually been a ton of examples over the years of researchers hacking into car systems wirelessly, some of which used the media system as the attack vector.
Even if the media subsystem is running on dedicated hardware, the fact that it's networked with the rest of the car means that there's still a risk of it being used to gain access to other components.
I imagine the ideal solution would be using two airgapped computers, one for the main car system, one for the media stuff, and then keep the servers from which they receive updates, and the authorization for those servers completely separated as well, with the updates done by different people, too.
But I imagine the vast majority of car makers don't do anything close to that, and probably not even Tesla does it like that. BMW wasn't even sending its OTA updates over HTTPS until 2 years ago.
I imagine most right now, if they even isolate the media and the main systems at all, probably do it through virtualization to "cut costs", so they don't even use two different chips. Heck, they may even use "containers" to cut costs even further.
And this is why I won't be a self-driving car beta tester in the first 10 years. You just can't trust these guys when up until now they didn't even have a clue about software security, to do this properly. And it's probably why "Silicon Valley car makers" will end up winning over the traditional car makers eventually, too.
Yep. Jeep Cherokee was hacked by connecting to multimedia system which supposed to be separate from driving system, yet our wasn't a problem.
All they had to was reprogram one of controllers and full access was granted.
Even if you don't reprogram controllers you don't have guarantee that some components won't go high wire when your modded version dies something different.
The best approach would be if manufacturers would provide an air gap, but they probably won't, to save costs.
If you read, he's running in a chroot within the TelsaOS (which I'm guessing controls a lot of the sensor in/outs for displays and can't really be removed).
So it's like running an X server and external display on your Android in a chroot, so it looks like you're running Ubuntu and Android.
I'm sure everyone is aware of the fact that all kinds of potential quality-of-service crosstalk/resource utilization issues are not prevented by a chroot.
I wonder what happens when you get into a bad crash, somebody decides to sue, and it comes out that your car was running modified software. Would you be exposing yourself to any liability?
Massad Ayoob recommends against [0] using a defensive firearm with, say, a modified trigger due to potential liability. [1] This situation seems similar.
Say you installed a media player. Now you'll have to convince a jury that you didn't install a media player just so you could watch videos while driving, and therefore were distracted at the time.
This always comes up in these threads, but I don't understand how it would be any different from millions of cars running around with modified engines, suspensions, brakes, non-OEM tires and wheels. If it can be shown that your modification contributed to the accident, then liability will be apportioned accordingly. Usually it can't.
Aren't you already liable for all damage in an at fault accident? If you modified it yourself, I'm not sure there's any blame that can be shifted around.
You know some people mod the engine on their car, right? Or swap the transmission? Changing the software is hardly the most significant modification owners do to their cars, at least for non-self-driving cars ;)
The code was (probably typical) contractor spaghetti code, with plenty of potential bugs. But, no conclusive reproduction steps were ever found - much less any that would cause it to continue acceleration with the brakes on, transmission disengaged, or key off.
Interesting that some believe rooting a car is going "too far", yet building our entire society and financial systems with duct-tape coding and fail-early-fail-often methodologies is okay.
I think when your life is on the line people tend to take it more seriously. Think of techniques like six sigma that rose during the manufacturing of parts for the Apollo program because losing a man was considered (and rightfully so) unacceptable.
There's a lot of Gentoo hate in this thread. I think that's funny when you consider that the most-used Linux distribution on desktop/laptop computers is based on Gentoo. [1]
Google chose engineers for ChromeOS, and those engineers chose Gentoo. CoreOS also uses portage IIRC. Gentoo isn't for everyone, but I think there's probably a correlation between people who have used Gentoo (or similar) at some point in their life and people who know Linux thoroughly.
ChromeOS originally was built upon Ubuntu, but Gentoo made more sense when starting to build for a rather diverse set of hardware, various flavours of ARM etc.
When I was 15 I started my linux days using gentoo, back in 2003/2004.
While the hassle of compiling and all the effort it took is laughable looking back on it, I still credit it for teaching me the command line and unix in general, these are skills I carry though with me to this day.
17 for me, and this is exactly how it is for me. Gentoo taught me Linux, and I have enjoyed it ever since. I use other distros as well, but Gentoo will always hold a special place in my heart.
I would love to buy a car with only FOSS software or at least source available software available inside. In the long run, I think it would be much safer than the status quo and with everything becoming computer-driven.
I've thought about doing something like this with my center nav, but it deals with setting the time on the mirror among other things. Still, I can't get updated maps without paying the dealer a few hundred dollars to put a cd in it. I end up just using openStreetMaps on my rooted phone. This is a sad state of things. It feels like a feature-phone. Hopefully the future is brighter.
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But still not quite for the faint of heart.
Even if the media subsystem is running on dedicated hardware, the fact that it's networked with the rest of the car means that there's still a risk of it being used to gain access to other components.
I imagine the ideal solution would be using two airgapped computers, one for the main car system, one for the media stuff, and then keep the servers from which they receive updates, and the authorization for those servers completely separated as well, with the updates done by different people, too.
But I imagine the vast majority of car makers don't do anything close to that, and probably not even Tesla does it like that. BMW wasn't even sending its OTA updates over HTTPS until 2 years ago.
I imagine most right now, if they even isolate the media and the main systems at all, probably do it through virtualization to "cut costs", so they don't even use two different chips. Heck, they may even use "containers" to cut costs even further.
And this is why I won't be a self-driving car beta tester in the first 10 years. You just can't trust these guys when up until now they didn't even have a clue about software security, to do this properly. And it's probably why "Silicon Valley car makers" will end up winning over the traditional car makers eventually, too.
All they had to was reprogram one of controllers and full access was granted.
Even if you don't reprogram controllers you don't have guarantee that some components won't go high wire when your modded version dies something different.
The best approach would be if manufacturers would provide an air gap, but they probably won't, to save costs.
So it's like running an X server and external display on your Android in a chroot, so it looks like you're running Ubuntu and Android.
[0]: http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2011/01/brad-kozak/the-mass...
[1]: http://www.royblack.com/files/Alvarez.pdf
Say you installed a media player. Now you'll have to convince a jury that you didn't install a media player just so you could watch videos while driving, and therefore were distracted at the time.
Does autopilot still work? Do the airbags still deploy? Does the brake still work?
Dead Comment
it is the same thing.
Would love to hear more about it from anyone who has more information.
https://users.ece.cmu.edu/~koopman/pubs/koopman14_toyota_ua_...
All the more reason to root the device.
Deleted Comment
Apparently we have long passed the era when making coffee was something novel for Emacs. Now is the time for
Deleted Comment
Blew my mind he pulled that out.
Google chose engineers for ChromeOS, and those engineers chose Gentoo. CoreOS also uses portage IIRC. Gentoo isn't for everyone, but I think there's probably a correlation between people who have used Gentoo (or similar) at some point in their life and people who know Linux thoroughly.
[1]: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-Chrome-OS-built-upon-Gentoo-and...
Internet culture throwback.
While the hassle of compiling and all the effort it took is laughable looking back on it, I still credit it for teaching me the command line and unix in general, these are skills I carry though with me to this day.
I've thought about doing something like this with my center nav, but it deals with setting the time on the mirror among other things. Still, I can't get updated maps without paying the dealer a few hundred dollars to put a cd in it. I end up just using openStreetMaps on my rooted phone. This is a sad state of things. It feels like a feature-phone. Hopefully the future is brighter.