I wonder how much DBus (the Inter-Process-Communication (IPC) standard Linux desktops have been based around) is baked into QNX & instrumental to it! Maybe I can find out now?
That was such a time. It's sad that it was a security panic, to me, because there was incredible promise there... All of the cars infotainment, windows, interior lighting, HVAC, all these things are just DBus services hosted on QNX? And I can just connect to my car & modify them, in some cases even over the air? QNX & DBus could have been a huge selling point, could have been such an awesome way to debundle the car from its infotainment. If only.
Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place. Seeing how monolithic versus networked QNX is in general would be fascinating; is there one or two QNX hosts & lots of devices, or so the story more distributed that that?
Maybe it's just the Uconnect infotainment system. The PDF I linked above is the in-depth Jeep hack run-down, and a huge huge huge part of it is playing around with the many many many many DBus services.
Is QNX just a kernel, no userland for it? I would have assumed it might include higher level offerings, including I would guess, to be helpful, some cross-system messaging options. Until now it's been impossible to guess. But yeah, it's quite likely this DBus stuff is just Dodge's repurposing of (not fantastic but reasonably ok and well known) messaging tech, DBus, layered atop.
QNX does provide a DBus implementation (based on the Linux one, so not a full reimplementation or anything) as part of the larger userland package, but it's in no way a core component of QNX itself and as far as I remember not used by any of the other services it ships with, so its purely there in case someone wants to use it for their application, e.g. because they also have a Linux version and don't want to use QNX-specific APIs if they can avoid it.
So yes, that was just a choice of whoever made the Jeep infotainment system.
https://ioactive.com/pdfs/IOActive_Remote_Car_Hacking.pdf or https://insights.sei.cmu.edu/blog/vehicle-cybersecurity-the-...
That was such a time. It's sad that it was a security panic, to me, because there was incredible promise there... All of the cars infotainment, windows, interior lighting, HVAC, all these things are just DBus services hosted on QNX? And I can just connect to my car & modify them, in some cases even over the air? QNX & DBus could have been a huge selling point, could have been such an awesome way to debundle the car from its infotainment. If only.
Really interested to see if DBus really does underpin much of QNX, or whether this was just a time & place. Seeing how monolithic versus networked QNX is in general would be fascinating; is there one or two QNX hosts & lots of devices, or so the story more distributed that that?