Am I the only one that finds this incredibly scary?
Sticking a USB drive into the car so that the primary computer can parse some file and then send some commands over (what I assume is) the CAN bus?
If you can send arbitrary messages over the CAN bus, I’m guessing you can do some serious damage, and even with precautions about what the parsing process can do, that’s still…very scary.
Not arbitrary messages and anyway can’t you send arbitrary messages over a CAN bus in an ordinary vehicle? Do most automotive manufacturers implement some kind of authentication of messages these days?
Arbitrary if the sending process is compromised through a parsing exploit of some sort. I’m not sure about CAN message authentication but it’d be much easier to convince someone to plug in a USB for lights/music than it’d be to plug into a diagnostic port making it an easier target.
Okay, I didn’t realize we were assuming an exploit in the parser which allows for arbitrary message sending. When I would write CAN logic we didn’t do any sort of authentication. And I know parsers have historically been an attack vector but I don’t understand how people write parsers that are exploitable for arbitrary CAN message sending.
Sticking a USB drive into the car so that the primary computer can parse some file and then send some commands over (what I assume is) the CAN bus?
If you can send arbitrary messages over the CAN bus, I’m guessing you can do some serious damage, and even with precautions about what the parsing process can do, that’s still…very scary.