As we noted previously, it means that many Kia owners may be unable to remotely unlock their vehicles or warm them up during an especially nasty winter storm hitting much of the country this week.
Cars had remote unlock and start decades ago (if not OEM, then aftermarket systems were and still are widely available), with zero dependence on what appears to be the company's servers. The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios ("your car has now become a subscription, please pay to unlock it"). Have we gone backwards...?
When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.
People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.
The fact that it's come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn't they'd suffer bad publicity is disgusting.
And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.
People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.
>People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock
People's lives are literally in the hands of optional firmware softlock all the time in medical devices that you can find in hospitals. If the hospital doesn't pay for x feature or for support technicians to service them, then some people could actually die.
Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.
I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.
If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren't they endangering the drivers of the budget version?
Am I the only one that remembers cars getting hijacked *while driving* because core systems were connected with the entertainment system [1]?
The whole 'lets smartify everything', 'control everything' or even 'collect usage information' is exhausting. We have collectively given up our freedom in the name of 'comfort' and often for features that nobody really needed but became mainstream.
I certainly agree with what you're saying. However, isn't this standard in many devices nowadays? Your iPhone can run any set of instructions, but it is artificially restricted to the subset found in Apple app store. It's the same thing in the car.
In general it can be assumed that any apparition of software in any piece of hardware is just a case of practical implementation of "organised scarcity".
I wonder how long before there is a large enough backlash from customers that "works fully offline" becomes a marketing label.
That's a really silly and wrong way of looking at it. Tesla has down society and you a great service by including additional capacity in your car above what you payed for. If they choose to let you have it for free, pat on the back for them. If not, then it is no different at all from someone dying in a Ford Focus that was only front wheel drive where all-wheel drive would have saved their lives.
The amazing thing is realizing that despite the increasing dangers and actual disasters involved, more and more things are going to be put on the Internet.
The equation everywhere is "the cost of the security is always too high because the failure of security is always an unusual situation and something that usually works and is cheaper will win in the marketplace."
This is more or less exactly the scenario that played out in Texas this week, Feb 14-19 2021. All the players (gov, regulators, power generators) decided that it was too expensive to weatherize the network for a 0.1% chance event.
What's described in the article is not a security problem. It's an availability problem. I would argue consumers DO care about the availability and I see lots of cloud based systems with local fallbacks.
When IKEA introduced cloud devices, IKEA hardly a company known for high prices or using expensive stuff in their products, they had local fallbacks. Their product is competing with the reliability of less expensive devices controlled with a light switch. Locks are another case where if you reinvent the wheel and get significantly less reliability people will be mad.
Although I imagine there’s a nonzero amount of people who have lost their keys already, and have been relying on the app rather than pay for a replacement.
I wonder if there are any car manufacturers boasting a 'dumb car' lineup. The current trend is pretty worrying. And sadly, it seems to get even worse with EVs. For some reason car manufacturers seem to want to market their EVs as 'smart-cars'. Which I find cringe worthy.
Do you mean buttons on key fobs? That's not what this is about. This is apps on phones that let you access the car. Why would you want to do that? Range of the signal, additional functionality (you can see the fuel level for example), and you don't need to have your key fob to use it.
Not having your key fob is huge for... Well... Accessibility by multiple definitions of the word. ADHD for instance makes it very easy to forget your keys and very easy to remember your phone.
If Kia's don't have a local override using a key or fob (?) it's just a simple misapplication of technology. Even where you are would want to control locks from the internet, security concerns be damned, you need a high availability way to open the lock locally.
New technologies aren't nessecarily robust against misapplication
> The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios
Your car might be parked further away than the radio distance, especially if you're living in a big city with few parking spaces. There are also a lot of scenarios where you are not at home but want to preheat your car anyways.
Yes, exactly. I‘m very happy my Hyundai has this feature as city parking more often than not means walking a few minutes to my car. Being able to pre heat, check the battery level, etc remotely is a feature I would not want to miss.
We have indeed gone backwards. Most homes and businesses have LANs, and yet almost every app works in a client/remote-server model, adding dozens of SPOFs where there need not be any.
Is it not the same with most aspects of software as consumption reaches economic critical mass?
Systems designed by and for users lose control to business interests.
Leading to streaming over media ownership, as we become renters in every domain.
Movies, shows, music, video games. “To improve the consumer experience” reads ever closer to “with DRM we can charge subscriptions in perpetuity (telemetry’s just a bonus!)”.
Why would I want or require internet to play a single player computer game? At least with cars, perhaps we’ll begin to see some pushback.
Battery life is partially a reason. If your car would be online 24h, it’d drain 12V battery faster. And you cannot trust iOS or Android not to kill your app in the background, when it’s waiting for the car to be awake to communicate. Servers can queue that for you.
I've tried multiple times, including contacting the corporate branch of the automaker and talking to multiple dealers, scouring the forums, and everything else in an attempt to disconnect my car from their online services (in theory, depending on the automaker, the hackers can completely brick your car).
My car isn't from Kia, but this is not unique to Kia. I eventually personally found the microcontroller and shorted the modem myself, after doing extensive work to figure out how to do it without breaking anything else.
It's a cellular antenna, like you'd find in your smartphone. And if I remember correctly it's soldered to the microcontroller, in a tight space with lots of wires (not to mention any potential metal contact points).
The antenna on the body of the car is for XM/FM/AM radio and is only a receiver. It's not connected to the cellular modem in any way at all as far as I can tell (apart from being attached to the same car).
It'll vary for each manufacturer, but in my case shorting the modem was trivial once you knew which pins to connect.
I would wager that this is by design - if you stop making payments on your car, they basically have lojack built in that would help them repossess it. That's why they make it nearly impossible to disable.
Remote unlock is the least of the problems here, the real issue is that cars have no business being connected to the vendors servers at all. This could have been entirely solved locally by pairing the car to one or more phones using BT/WiFi. How remote does it have to be, you don't really want to be able to start your car if you're not in WiFi range.
Yeah, I also like the ability of third parties like Teslabout to provide dashboards of your car usage. Personally, I want "personal telemetry" in all my devices: if protocols like Solid ( https://solidproject.org ) were more well-established, they'd be a great way to have this sort of functionality without relying on the vendor to store/process all the data.
Agreed, those are reasonable additional features. And critically, they aren't necessary for the car to function (so they could, and should, be optional).
This could be done via ZigBee, you'd plug in a transceiver to your home local home network your phone could connect to you or access via BT. Or maybe the keyfob itself can act as a ZigBee transceiver?
I love technology. I think it's great. I think it's the bee's knees.
My house thermostat is failing. Many segments on the display don't work, the programmable bits no longer work, I woke up to a frigid house last week.
I went on amazon.com and looked at thermostats. Internet connectivity galore, fancy phone apps, full color LCD displays, dashboards and logging, the works.
I bought an $18 model that has a weekend/weekday programmable schedule. I know I can't trust these vendors. They care entirely too little about my security.
Some day I may sit down and build myself arduino-based thermostat, but that day is not today.
> Remote unlock is the least of the problems here, the real issue is that cars have no business being connected to the vendors servers at all.
Why do you think that? It provides valuable functionality that I use, such as journey logging, fuel status, access from an app, and so on. You need an intermediate server run by the vendor. I can't give it my phone's IP address, can I!
Maybe something simpler like a stun/turn server would be enough. Or something with no infrastructure (or recurring fees) at all, only working in my local network (like my printer).
According to the original article [1] (The Drive one is just a poor rewrite), Hyundai is also affected.
>After the publishing of this story, numerous Hyundai and dealership employees contacted BleepingComputer to state that Hyundai was also affected by unexplained outages.
>In emails sent by Hyundai Motors America to Kia dealerships on Saturday and seen by BleepingComputer, Hyundai stated that multiple systems were down including their internal dealer site, hyundaidealer.com.
I mean how else would ransomware authors demand payment? Classical solutions are too easy to trace. This is one of the worst byproducts of crypto. Turns out permissionless means people you don’t want using the system, using the system for things you don’t want them doing. Who’d have thought.
Monero. Its designed to be far less tracable than BTC and many exchanges exist online that trade XMR for BTC. I am surprised BTC still has this large presence in the blackmarket.
XMR has too little plausible deniability at the onramp and offramp, and is getting delisted from exchanges. Like any money laundering business the process relies on plausible deniability. Think Los Pollos Hermanos.
Monero markets itself to criminals. Bitcoin to speculators and ancaps. You can hide your BTC gains by saying you made some leveraged trades in Malta. You can’t hide your Monero gains. Ironically it’s what makes it better at its job that makes it less useful.
> I am surprised BTC still has this large presence in the blackmarket.
The people buying goods online are not usually very tech savvy, so you lose a lot of potential customers by requiring a difficult-to-acquire cryptocurrency. Those selling the goods usually know what's up though, so they're still going to be doing the BTC->XMR->BTC->exchange swap in order to hide their identity.
edit: You would be surprised how dumb some people are online though. Nowadays folks are a bit wiser, but the original silk road got taken down because they used hotmail, lol.
I’m as anti-Bitcoin as the next guy, but I still don’t see how it enables all these ransomware attacks. If the federal government were serious about pursuing this why not just follow the public, immutable transfer record and indict and sanction everyone associated with any entity along the way?
Not being able to do business with any business that does business in the United States is a pretty big deal. Not to mention your executives not being able to travel anywhere with an extradition treaty.
“All outputs in the Bitcoin transaction with hash <...> are illegal to redeem.”
This, however, means that criminals (who don’t care about the law) can still use these segregated Bitcoin to transact between themselves — as long as miners aren’t punished by including the illegal transactions in new blocks.
I guess I don't really understand what the plan is, since all bitcoin transactions have a permanent record that are publicly viewable by all. You can't hide bitcoin, every transaction they were involved in is recorded. If they ever want to turn the bitcoin back into real currency they need to go through an exchange to convert it, and the gov can just ask the exchange for the info / bank account of the person associated with the bitcoin.
When you transfer to a bank account, it cannot move out of the country's jurisdiction without triggering multiple regulatory touchpoints. It's not easy to cash the money out overseas.
But when you transfer bitcoin, it's done once to a virtual ID. The person receiving doesn't need any online account. You can't trace anything here. It's just "sending from wallet id X to wallet id Y". wallet id Y is just a cryptographic key known to the sender and receiver. Yeah so this "virtual ID" is replicated across the network, but who cares. It doesn't point to anyone yet.
After this single step, there is no jurisdiction. The hacker can travel and cash it anywhere in the world outside jurisdiction of the host country's law enforcement.
You can tumble bitcoins. You can use decentralised and/or dodgy exchanges to change bitcoin into other cryptocurrencies, and then back after breaking the trail.
I own a 03 Ram 2500 with a 5.9 Cummins engine. It has 250,000 miles and from the forums it can easy get to 1 million miles. There is no infotainment system to show the truck's age, distract you, or break from a bad solider joint. I've fixed everything myself on that truck from the transmission to the axle seals. The vehicle is actually increasing in value because it has a grand fathered in diesel engine. I have no idea why someone would buy a car with so many confusers (AVE for computer) that will only give you grief down the road (literally).
Liking one specific generation of technology is just being a modern amish. I'm pretty your old truck is an abomination for some old timer. New tech will be tested and bad ideas will be eventually abandoned down the road, this is how it works.
His truck is an environmental abomination, and almost certainly not as safe as a more modern vehicle, not to mention the hundreds of hours (thousands?) he's had to pour into understanding his vehicle and performing his own maintenance.
You make trade-offs, which is fine until you pretend like your set of trade-offs is the best set, and everyone else is wrong.
There's a lot of symmetry with farmers buying 40 year old tractors. For exactly the same reasons. I really hope the pendulum swings the other way if even just a bit. I mean, there are still new dumb-phones being made. So maybe there's hope for dumb-other-things as well.
Hate to break it to you, but a zener diode on your ECM can fail short, which burns up the pcb trace for the power. And the ECM is glued together, and it's ridiculously hard to open up without damaging it further, and it has a flexible pcb that can split if you flex it too much once you get it open. (I have one sitting 5 feet from me).
My car is a 2007 and I've kept it around for similar reasons. The one thing that scares me the most about having a car that old is safety. Newer cars are a lot heavier and stiffer, so even cars that are considerably smaller could annihilate mine in an accident.
It's not quite to this extreme, but IIHS did a test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtxd27jlZ_g) a while back that showed the difference in safety standards between a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009 Malibu. The Bel Air is about 5% heavier.
Probably less of a worry in a 3/4-ton truck though.
Cars are really going in the wrong direction overall. I do like a car with some tech like power windows, memory seats etc but I do not want to connect it to the internet. I have my smartphone for it already. I want my car to be dumb. Add Key, it works. No key, you are locked out and you can call someone to unlock it for you.
Btw, not to mention that New Cars are becoming too expensive compared to say 15-20 years ago due to all this "tech" while the engines are becoming crappy with plastic (shout out to famous youtuber Scotty Kilmer if anyone knows him :))
i'm not sure how much the tech adds to the price of the car. More likely the price increase is due to much stricter crash safety standards then existed 20 years ago. If crappy plastic makes an engine more reliable, economical, powerful and cheaper, then most people are willing to give up on some durability.
The original buyer is covered by the warranty so doesn't care about the plastic parts that will, likely, not wear out in the first couple of years anyhow.
The next sucker down the line though is in for some severe finacial pain.
Readit News
Cars had remote unlock and start decades ago (if not OEM, then aftermarket systems were and still are widely available), with zero dependence on what appears to be the company's servers. The only advantage I can fathom for being able to unlock and start a car over the Internet instead of only by being within radio range seems more oriented towards attackers and other user-hostile scenarios ("your car has now become a subscription, please pay to unlock it"). Have we gone backwards...?
I don't understand why after this people weren't in an uproar.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/11/business/tesla-battery-ir...
When Tesla decided generously to temporarily grant residents fleeing a hurricane an upgrade that allowed full usage of their battery.
People's lives were literally in the hands of an optional, upsold firmware softlock.
The fact that it's come to that is completely appalling. When the manufacturer of your car has the power to save your life because if they didn't they'd suffer bad publicity is disgusting.
And the fact is, the only reason why hackers are able to gain access to vehicles, the only reason for any of it is because companies have decided cars need to be a service provided by them so they can keep making money after the initial purchase.
People buy cars so they can travel freely without relying on others. Making cars reliant on a third party server for something as basic as the ingition goes against the entire premise of owning a car.
People's lives are literally in the hands of optional firmware softlock all the time in medical devices that you can find in hospitals. If the hospital doesn't pay for x feature or for support technicians to service them, then some people could actually die.
Saving lives or not, you can't blame a company for not giving you for free features you haven't paid for.
I thought on the checkout page Tesla was pretty explicit that they were selling a 75 kWh model with discounts thrown in for artificially software-restricted 60 kWh version.
If an ICE brand sold two trims of the same vehicle - the cheaper one with the smaller tank or worse fuel economy, is it as appalling and aren't they endangering the drivers of the budget version?
The whole 'lets smartify everything', 'control everything' or even 'collect usage information' is exhausting. We have collectively given up our freedom in the name of 'comfort' and often for features that nobody really needed but became mainstream.
[1] https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...
I wonder how long before there is a large enough backlash from customers that "works fully offline" becomes a marketing label.
The equation everywhere is "the cost of the security is always too high because the failure of security is always an unusual situation and something that usually works and is cheaper will win in the marketplace."
Have we gone backwards.
Yes, expect more of this.
Yet... here we are. Entirely predictable.
When IKEA introduced cloud devices, IKEA hardly a company known for high prices or using expensive stuff in their products, they had local fallbacks. Their product is competing with the reliability of less expensive devices controlled with a light switch. Locks are another case where if you reinvent the wheel and get significantly less reliability people will be mad.
This would only break the mobile app's ability to unlock the car, for example if you misplace your keys.
Never operated a fleet, though - so that's my speculation.
Do you mean buttons on key fobs? That's not what this is about. This is apps on phones that let you access the car. Why would you want to do that? Range of the signal, additional functionality (you can see the fuel level for example), and you don't need to have your key fob to use it.
There's still no need to make it go out through the Internet and back again --- even Bluetooth has more than adequate range.
In fact, I'd argue that the limited range is a benefit, because it prevents some hacker anywhere else in the world from manipulating your car.
New technologies aren't nessecarily robust against misapplication
Your car might be parked further away than the radio distance, especially if you're living in a big city with few parking spaces. There are also a lot of scenarios where you are not at home but want to preheat your car anyways.
Sort of. A lot of this is pushed by fleet sales, where it makes more sense (to the customer).
Deleted Comment
Systems designed by and for users lose control to business interests.
Leading to streaming over media ownership, as we become renters in every domain.
Movies, shows, music, video games. “To improve the consumer experience” reads ever closer to “with DRM we can charge subscriptions in perpetuity (telemetry’s just a bonus!)”.
Why would I want or require internet to play a single player computer game? At least with cars, perhaps we’ll begin to see some pushback.
Yes, I think this is a reasonable conclusion from your priors.
My car isn't from Kia, but this is not unique to Kia. I eventually personally found the microcontroller and shorted the modem myself, after doing extensive work to figure out how to do it without breaking anything else.
(perhaps silly?) question - why not just disable the antenna or put it in an appropriate faraday cage?
The antenna on the body of the car is for XM/FM/AM radio and is only a receiver. It's not connected to the cellular modem in any way at all as far as I can tell (apart from being attached to the same car).
It'll vary for each manufacturer, but in my case shorting the modem was trivial once you knew which pins to connect.
I would think that breaking the antenna would be easier.
Or are they not that large anymore since car bodies have so much plastic in them these days and not so much metal to interfere with the signal?
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B-0IaQ-frKqPb3l4MnFKZlF1SVh...
My SO absolutely loves being able to enter a heated (winter) or cooled (summer) car for the drive home from a cafe, restaurant or similar.
Parking for these activities is seldom within direct phone range (BT/WiFi), so would have to be something else.
My house thermostat is failing. Many segments on the display don't work, the programmable bits no longer work, I woke up to a frigid house last week.
I went on amazon.com and looked at thermostats. Internet connectivity galore, fancy phone apps, full color LCD displays, dashboards and logging, the works.
I bought an $18 model that has a weekend/weekday programmable schedule. I know I can't trust these vendors. They care entirely too little about my security.
Some day I may sit down and build myself arduino-based thermostat, but that day is not today.
Why do you think that? It provides valuable functionality that I use, such as journey logging, fuel status, access from an app, and so on. You need an intermediate server run by the vendor. I can't give it my phone's IP address, can I!
1. Why couldn't you give it your phone's IP?
2. You could just as easily use USB, Bluetooth, or local wifi, none of which require anything other than your phone and your car.
>After the publishing of this story, numerous Hyundai and dealership employees contacted BleepingComputer to state that Hyundai was also affected by unexplained outages.
>In emails sent by Hyundai Motors America to Kia dealerships on Saturday and seen by BleepingComputer, Hyundai stated that multiple systems were down including their internal dealer site, hyundaidealer.com.
[1] https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kia-motors-am...
Monero markets itself to criminals. Bitcoin to speculators and ancaps. You can hide your BTC gains by saying you made some leveraged trades in Malta. You can’t hide your Monero gains. Ironically it’s what makes it better at its job that makes it less useful.
You really want to toe the line.
The people buying goods online are not usually very tech savvy, so you lose a lot of potential customers by requiring a difficult-to-acquire cryptocurrency. Those selling the goods usually know what's up though, so they're still going to be doing the BTC->XMR->BTC->exchange swap in order to hide their identity.
edit: You would be surprised how dumb some people are online though. Nowadays folks are a bit wiser, but the original silk road got taken down because they used hotmail, lol.
Not being able to do business with any business that does business in the United States is a pretty big deal. Not to mention your executives not being able to travel anywhere with an extradition treaty.
“All outputs in the Bitcoin transaction with hash <...> are illegal to redeem.”
This, however, means that criminals (who don’t care about the law) can still use these segregated Bitcoin to transact between themselves — as long as miners aren’t punished by including the illegal transactions in new blocks.
When you transfer to a bank account, it cannot move out of the country's jurisdiction without triggering multiple regulatory touchpoints. It's not easy to cash the money out overseas.
But when you transfer bitcoin, it's done once to a virtual ID. The person receiving doesn't need any online account. You can't trace anything here. It's just "sending from wallet id X to wallet id Y". wallet id Y is just a cryptographic key known to the sender and receiver. Yeah so this "virtual ID" is replicated across the network, but who cares. It doesn't point to anyone yet.
After this single step, there is no jurisdiction. The hacker can travel and cash it anywhere in the world outside jurisdiction of the host country's law enforcement.
Existing transactions cover other usecases just fine
Dead Comment
You make trade-offs, which is fine until you pretend like your set of trade-offs is the best set, and everyone else is wrong.
New tech being abandoned down the road doesn't help any of the poor saps who bought that new tech.
It's not quite to this extreme, but IIHS did a test (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtxd27jlZ_g) a while back that showed the difference in safety standards between a 1959 Bel Air and a 2009 Malibu. The Bel Air is about 5% heavier.
Probably less of a worry in a 3/4-ton truck though.
Deleted Comment
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/kia-motors-am...
Btw, not to mention that New Cars are becoming too expensive compared to say 15-20 years ago due to all this "tech" while the engines are becoming crappy with plastic (shout out to famous youtuber Scotty Kilmer if anyone knows him :))
The next sucker down the line though is in for some severe finacial pain.