Comment on Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal - The Verge

• fubo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

  Other way around. Unsupervised OTA updates are dangerous.

  First: A car is a piece of safety-critical equipment. It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation. Any change to its operation, without the operator being aware that a change was made, puts the operator and other people at risk. If the operator takes the car into the shop for a documented recall, they know that something is being changed. An unsupervised OTA update can (and will) alter the behavior of safety-critical equipment without the operator’s knowledge.

  Second: Any facility for OTA updates is an attack vector. If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer. Because the car is safety-critical equipment — unlike your phone, it can kill people — it is unreasonable to expose it to these attacks.

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  • loobkoob@kbin.social ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    If a car can receive OTA updates from the manufacturer, then it can receive harmful OTA updates from an attacker who has compromised the car’s update mechanism or the manufacturer.

    There's potential for a very dystopian future where we see people assassinated, not via car bomb but via the their cars being hacked to remove braking functionality (or something similar). And then a constant game of security whack-a-mole like we see with anti-virus software. And then some brilliant entrepreneur will start selling firewalls for cars. And then it'll be passed into law that it's illegal to use a vehicle that doesn't have an active firewall/anti-virus subscription.

    It almost feels like the obvious path things will go down. Yay, capitalism...

    I'm not totally opposed to software being used in cars (as long as it's tested and can be trusted to the degree mechanical components are) but yeah, OTA updates just seem like a terrible idea just for a little convenience. I'd rather see updates delivered via plugging the car in (and not via the charging port - it would need to be a specific data transfer port for security reasons). Alert people when there's an update, and even allow the car to "refuse to boot" if it detects it's not on the latest version. But updates should absolutely be done manually and securely.

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    • fubo@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Cutting someone’s brake lines has been a means of assassination for a while. What’s new here is that it could potentially be done remotely, e.g. an attacker in Bucharest targeting a victim in Seattle on behalf of a payer in Moscow.

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      • FarceOfWill@infosec.pub ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Remotely at scale.

        So yeah you could assassinate someone like that, or you could break every cars brakes at once and have thousands of simultaneous car accidents timed during some other infrastructure attack

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      • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        it could also be done with a simple device that checks your location - e.g. down a hill with a traffic light at the bottom.

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  • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    Wow man, I never thought about your 2nd point before. Every car like this is a kinetic drone weapon waiting to be activated. And I was worried about the “self driving” mode…

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  • kinkles@sh.itjust.works ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    I don’t think anyone will disagree with you about unsupervised OTA updates.

    To your first point- I agree that any update that changes the behavior of any system in a car is pretty reckless. Especially ones that increase a car’s acceleration. I don’t know why those sorts of updates aren’t being regulated harder. OTA updates should be for mundane things like infotainment updates or, in more serious cases, to fix systems that aren’t functioning properly. It shouldn’t otherwise be used to alter how the car functions as a car.

    However, to your second point, cars are smart now and there’s no going back. So cars do need software updates to close attack vectors.

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  • abhibeckert@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    It has a skilled operator who has familiarized themselves with its operation

    Um, what city do you live in? Can I live there please? Not many skilled drivers around here.

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  • DoomBot5@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

    You do realize your entire first point is invalidated by the comment you’re replying to? I just said the customer has to press a button on their phone to initiate the update. On that same phone they can view release notes that clearly outline the recall. Additional on first use, the car will display those same release notes on the screen.

    Sure, safety vs convenience is a huge factor in software development. The biggest factor to safety is unpatched software. You know, the kind that requires significant effort to update, such as needing to bring your car into the shop to apply.

    Overall your doom and gloom argument against OTA safety updates is pretty weak.

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    • Ultragigagigantic@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

      Oh good, hackers can’t bypass button presses. I was worried for a bit, appreciate you helping us out.

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      • DoomBot5@lemmy.world ⁨6⁩ ⁨months⁩ ago

        Mr hackerman couldn’t get to the car because it crashed first due to a software bug the customer did not have time to take his car to the shop to fix.

        The real world is quite different than the idealistic one.

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