RESEARCH | August 14, 2014

Remote survey paper (car hacking)

By Chris Valasek

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!

Launch PDF

EDITORIAL | August 5, 2014

Upcoming Blackhat & DEF CON talk: A Survey of Remote Automotive Attack Surfaces

By Chris Valasek

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.

We are going to look at a bunch of cars’ network topology, cyber physical features, and remote attack surfaces. We are also going to show a video of our automotive intrusion prevention/detection system.

While I’m sure many of you want find out which car we think is most hackable (and you will), we don’t want that to be the focus of our research. The biggest problem we faced while researching the Toyota Prius and Ford Escape was the small sample set. We were able to dive deeply into two vehicles, but the biggest downfall was only learning about two specific vehicles.

Our research and presentation focus on understanding the technology and implementations, at a high level, for several major automotive manufacturers. We feel that by examining how different manufacturers design their automotive networks, we’ll be able to make more general comments about vehicle security, instead of only referencing the two aforementioned automobiles.

I hope to see everyone in Vegas and would love it if you show up for our talk. It’s at 11:45 AM in Lagoon K on Wednesday August 6.

— CV

P.S. Come to the talk for some semi-related, never-before-seen hacks.

INSIGHTS | January 13, 2009

Blackhat USA 2009 Poll – Rev Eng Class

By IOActive

During last years Blackhat and Defcon conferences, several individuals asked me about possibly giving classes on the security model of commonly found microcontrollers. Jeff Moss’ group setup a poll here. Given today’s Silicon technology has become so small yet so large, it would be best to determine which architecture and which devices everyone is most interested in. The current poll will determine which brand micro to target (Atmel AVR or Microchip PIC) and after this is decided, we will need more input to narrow the class down to a few devices of the chosen family.

While the classes are not cheap, all participants will learn and understand the chosen targets security model. Armed with such knowledge will help you to understand and recognize potential risks in future design work allowing you to avoid the possibility of compromise (and I suppose this would also enhance job security :). Full mosaic blowups of the targets, decapsulated devices, use of a probe station and all users will “modify” the security model of their devices themselves (unless they ask for some help). I don’t believe such a class has ever been given and seating will be limited per class.

Feel free to comment here but Blackhat really needs the feedback.

Thank you,

-Christopher Tarnovsky