Lawsuit counterproductive for automotive industry
It came to my attention that there is a lawsuit attempting to seek damages against automakers revolving around their cars being hackable (http://www.networkworld.com/article/2895535/microsoft-subnet/ford-gm-and-toyota-are-being-sued-for-dangerous-defects-in-their-hackable-cars.html). The lawsuit cites Dr. Charlie Miller’s and my work several times, along with several other researchers who have been involved in automotive security research. I’d like to be the first to say that I think this lawsuit is unfortunate and subverts the spirit of our research. Charlie and I approached our work with the end goals of determining if technologically advanced…
Life in the Fast Lane
Hi Internet Friends, Chris Valasek here. You may remember me from educational films such as “Two Minus Three Equals Negative Fun”. If you have not heard, IOActive officially launched our Vehicle Security Service offering. I’ve received several questions about the service and plan to answer them and many more during a webinar I am hosting on February 5, 2015 at 11 AM EST. Some of the main talking points include: Why dedicate an entire service offering to vehicles and transportation? A brief history of vehicle security research and why…
A Dirty Distillation of Proposed V2V Readiness
Good Afternoon Internet, Chris Valasek here. You may remember me from such automated information kiosks as “Welcome to Springfield Airport”, and “Where’s Nordstrom?” Ever since Dr. Charlie Miller and I began our car hacking adventures, we’ve been asked about the upcoming Vehicle-to-Vehicle (V2V) initiative and haven’t had much to say because we only knew about the technology in the abstract. I finally decided to read the proposed documentation from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) titled: “Vehicle-to-Vehicle Communications: Readiness of V2V Technology for Application” (https://ioactive.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Readiness-of-V2V-Technology-for-Application-812014.pdf). This is…
Remote survey paper (car hacking)
Good Afternoon Interwebs, Chris Valasek here. You may remember me from such nature films as “Earwigs: Eww”. Charlie and I are finally getting around to publicly releasing our remote survey paper. I thought this went without saying but, to reiterate, we did NOT physically look at the cars that we discussed. The survey was designed as a high level overview of the information that we acquired from the mechanic’s sites for each manufacturer. The ‘Hackability’ is based upon our previous experience with automobiles, attack surface, and network structure. Enjoy!
Upcoming Blackhat & DEF CON talk: A Survey of Remote Automotive Attack Surfaces
Hi Internet, Chris Valasek here; you may remember me from such movies as ‘They Came to Burgle Carnegie Hall’. In case you haven’t heard, Dr. Charlie Miller and I will be giving a presentation at Black Hat and DEF CON titled ‘A Survey of Remote Automotive Attack Surfaces’. You may have seen some press coverage on Wired, CNN, and Dark Reading several days ago. I really think they all did a fantastic job covering what we’ll be talking about.
Car Hacking 2: The Content
Does everyone remember when those two handsome young gentlemen controlled automobiles with CAN message injection (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oqe6S6m73Zw)? I sure do. However, what if you don’t have the resources to purchase a car, pay for insurance, repairs to the car, and so on? Fear not Internet! Chris and Charlie to the rescue. Last week we presented our new automotive research at Syscan 2014. To make a long story short, we provided the blueprints to setup a small automotive network outside the vehicle so security researchers could start investigating Autosec…
heapLib 2.0
Hi everyone, as promised I’m releasing my code for heapLib2. For those of you not familiar, I introduced methods to perform predictable and controllable allocations/deallocations of strings in IE9-IE11 using JavaScript and the DOM. Much of this work is based on Alex Sotirov’s research from quite a few years ago (http://www.phreedom.org/research/heap-feng-shui/). The zip file contains: heapLib2.js => The JavaScript library that needs to be imported to use heapLib2 heapLib2_test.html => Example usage of some of the functionality that is available in heapLib2 html_spray.py => A Python script…
IE heaps at Nordic Security Conference
Remember when I used to be the Windows Heap guy? Yeah, me neither ;). I just wanted to give everyone a heads up regarding my upcoming presentation “An Examination of String Allocations: IE-9 Edition” at Nordic Security Conference (www.nsc.is). The presentation title is a bit vague so I figured I would give a quick overview. First, I’ll briefly discuss the foundational knowledge regarding heap based memory allocations using JavaScript strings in IE-6 and IE-7. These technics to manipulate the heap are well documented and have been known for…
Car Hacking: The Content
Hi Everyone, As promised, Charlie and I are releasing all of our tools and data, along with our white paper. We hope that these items will help others get involved in automotive security research. The paper is pretty refined but the tools are a snapshot of what we had. There are probably some things that are deprecated or do not work, but things like ECOMCat and ecomcat_api should really be all you need to start with your projects. Thanks again for all the support! Content: http://illmatics.com/content.zip Paper:…
Las Vegas 2013
Again, that time of the year is approaching; thousands of people from the security community are preparing to head to Las Vegas for the most important hacking events: Black Hat USA and DefCon. IOActive will (as we do every year) have an important presence at these conferences. We have some great researchers from our team presenting at Black Hat USA and DefCon. At Black Hat USA, Barnaby Jack will be presenting “Implantable medical devices: hacking humans”, and Lucas Apa and Carlos Mario Panagos will be presenting “Compromising industrial…