Comment on Doordash deserves it's fate
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 week agoThe Stuxnet worm was created by the US government likely with hundreds of people working on it for half a decade or more, not some random hacker group.
There are ways to protect self cars, giving them a command to drive somewhere isn’t inherently dangerous. The commands to send them to a destination will not be able to control HOW the car gets there, that will all be done locally on the vehicle self-driving software. It won’t be possible to tell the car “go drive into this building” since the driving software simply won’t allow for such a request remotely.
The most impactful thing that hackers could do is tell all the vehicles to pull over and stop where they are, which would cause problems of course, but it’s hardly the end of the world. Essentially a form of DDOS attack on cars, but it would be detected almost instantly and likely the vehicles with occupants could just override it locally.
What exactly is a hacker group going to do with a fleet of cars that can certainly still be located by the corporation that owns them since they’re literally connected to cellphone (and probably satellite these days) networks all the time. There’s not that much value for a hacker in obtaining a self-driving car that can’t drive by itself because it’s not connected to it’s network. The resale value for the fancy sensors and chips inside them is pretty much zero.
Again if people want unattended cars they can do this a lot easier than hacking a massive corporation to get access to them.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
If the goal is to steal the cars then all it takes is to order them to go somewhere while disabling (perhaps via DDoS) the logging and other telemetry servers that allow them to track the vehicles. Once they’re stopped where the criminals want them they can break in and disable the power supply to shut them down completely, then tow/push them into shipping containers to send overseas for modification and resale.
There already exist international criminal gangs who do this sort of thing. Think of the resources of an organization the size of the Gulf Cartel. They operate their own cell phone network in Mexico. They’ve got hundreds of engineers. They absolutely could do an operation like this.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Why would the onboard software ever allow (or even support the ability) to disable connectivity?
The tracking doesn’t even need to happen on the vehicle itself, given that they’re likely to use cellular connections the tracking from the cell company can locate it.
My point is that there’s no benefit to stealing a self-driving car over a regular car, so why would these gangs switch? None of the self-driving features will work when it can’t connect to the network, and none of the extra parts have any sort of resale value separate from their intended use. They may as well continue stealing regular cars.
chonglibloodsport@lemmy.world 1 week ago
Who said anything about software? Cut the wires to the battery! That will power down any car no matter what.
The benefit to stealing a self driving car is that it’s a self driving car! What’s the retail price of self driving cars? $100k? More? The whole premise of the self-driving taxi and delivery companies is that the cars are too expensive for the consumer market so they operate on a rental basis instead. If self-driving cars became a mass market commodity like regular cars then thieves would just steal them the old fashioned way.
Of course the self-driving features work without the network. GPS works without a cell network. It’s a receive-only protocol. The only thing that won’t work is the remote command and control dispatch. That would have to be hacked around.
BlameThePeacock@lemmy.ca 1 week ago
Cutting the wires will work, but it’s already recorded it’s location and transmitted that data by the point you get to that point.
There’s no way that the self-driving car companies won’t require regular check ins on the network to function in self-driving mode. You can’t even play many single player video games these days without an internet connection.
Essentially it won’t be a self-driving car once you’ve stolen it, and it may not even be a regular car either because some of the proposed models don’t even have steering wheels or pedals. Even if you did crack the software, it’s not going to be loaded with any sort of relevant self-driving functionality for <insert 3rd world country where they don’t check vehicle registration here>, it won’t have maps, it won’t be trained on the local signs, traffic lights, road markings, etc. it may not even operate on the correct side of the road.