I could see in a future where most cars are FOBs using a weaponized interference to prevent people from accessing their cars. An authoritarian regime might really enjoy that capability.
Or enemies who've spent the last decade systematically building a library of vulnerabilities and footholds in tons of (government and consumer) infrastructure.
Did you read the Valasek/Miller paper on the Jeep hack? For me, the technical details were all well and good, but the most interesting bit was right in the intrioduction -- Their research was funded by DARPA.
Wait, what?
Consider this: Everyone knows that water supplies and power grids are critical infrastructure. Bridges and tunnels, too. Transit, obviously -- an attack on the NYC subways would cripple the city. That's all understood and appropriately protected.
But imagine an attack that caused 10% of the cars on the road right now to simply turn off, and not turn on again. Some folks would pull to the side, but a lot wouldn't, and the roads would be an obstacle course for quite some time, while every tow truck scrambled to clear them. In my mind, that's just as crippling as shutting down a subway or an airport.
Individual vehicles haven't been thought of as critical infrastructure in the past, because they weren't vulnerable to that sort of attack. But they're becoming so, and in the most haphazard, security-what-security, if-it-compiles-ship-it, sort of way. And I think DARPA's goal in sponsoring this sort of research is to force people to realize that.
