Wired - Hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek have proven more clearly than anyone in the world how vulnerable cars are to digital attack. Now they’re proposing the first step towards a solution.
Last year the two Darpa-funded security researchers spent months cracking into a Ford Escape and a Toyota Prius, terrifying each other with tricks like slamming on the brakes or hijacking the vehicles’ steering with only digital commands sent from a laptop plugged into a standard data port under the dash. At the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas next month, they’ll unveil a prototype device designed to foil the same unnerving tricks they’ve demonstrated: An intrusion-detection system for automobiles. “These attacks seemed serious enough that we should actually consider how to defend against them,” says Miller, who holds a day job as a security researcher for Twitter. “We actually wanted to do something to help solve this problem.”1
They built their anti-hacking device for $150 in parts: an mbed NXP micro controller and a simple board. This plugs into a jack underneath a car or truck’s dashboard known as the OBD2 port. Power it on for a minute during routine driving, and it captures the vehicle’s typical data patterns. Then switch it into detection mode to monitor for anomalies like an unusual flood of signals or a command that should be sent when the car is parked but shows up when you’re instead doing 80 on the highway. Read More
