Posted on June 9, 2017 at 10:53 AM
Driverless Cars Can Get Hacked
Nowadays, a touch screen infotainment system equipped with Satellite Navigation is very common and even the cheapest of the cheapest car comes equipped with it. However, these features are not just convenient, they can prove to be harmful too. If any component of the car is connected to the Internet, then it is an easy target for a hacker.
The technological development is very high and as a result, even car communicate with each other in order to provide better traffic conditions and other added benefits to you.
A driverless car is the dream of all the car enthusiasts but it will possibly take five or even ten more years for the companies to produce a real driverless car. There will be no steering wheel in a driverless car too.
While the car manufacturers work on the driverless car project, the cyber experts are finding new ways to make the connections of the car more secure and safe. Nevertheless, they have not been able to solve all the problems that are hard to figure out.
The major challenges faced by the cyber security companies is not letting the hackers get any access to the main computing system of the car, as a hacker then can easily control the car like a toy.
Marc Rogers, the main security researcher of CloudFlare (a cybersecurity firm) said that if car manufacturers hurry, they could still solve this problem in time.
Even after seeing the frequent hacks in Teslas and Jeeps, most of the automotive manufacturers are focusing on installing new gateways from the driver’s system to the car’s CAN network. The gateways can be hacked with patience and skilled hacker.
The stubborn car makers are making things complicated for one another by focusing on V2V technology more than the cyber security of the car. This way, the security system of the car will get much more complex and hard to secure. The government does support vehicle-to-vehicle interaction in cars but this feature decreases the security level of the vehicle very much.
The experts are not stopping researching for new methods for convenience like the vehicle-to-infrastructure interaction; it allows the police to slow down automatically cars near particular buildings like a school.
Some Tesla Model S owners claimed that they have found a customizable edition of the classical Linux known as Ubuntu. It was released in October 2010 and was not supported since Dec-2014.
Overall, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the Federal Trade Commission might be the leaders to govern the cyber security issue in these cars. Because there are a couple of years left in making a full-fledged driverless car, cyber security firms and companies are already finding problems and errors to solve in the cars.
