EDITORIAL | August 5, 2014

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.

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.