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A flaw buried deep in the hearts of all modern cars allows an attacker with local or even remote access to a vehicle to shut down various components, including safety systems such as airbags, brakes, parking sensors, and others.
The vulnerability affects the CAN (Controller Area Network) protocol that's deployed in modern cars and used to manage communications between a vehicle's internal components.
The flaw was discovered by a collaborative effort of Politecnico di Milano, Linklayer Labs, and Trend Micro's Forward-looking Threat Research (FTR) team.
Researchers say this flaw is not a vulnerability in the classic meaning of the word. This is because the flaw is more of a CAN standard design choice that makes it unpatchable.
Patching the issue means changing how the CAN standard works at its lowest levels. Researchers say car manufacturers can only mitigate the vulnerability via specific network countermeasures, but cannot eliminate it entirely.
"To eliminate the risk entirely, an updated CAN standard should be proposed, adopted, and implemented," researchers say. "Realistically, it would take an entire generation of vehicles for such a vulnerability to be resolved, not just a recall or an OTA (on-the-air) upgrade."
[...] The Department of Homeland Security's ICS-CERT has issued an alert regarding this flaw, albeit there is little to be done on the side of car makers.
"The only current recommendation for protecting against this exploit is to limit access to input ports (specifically OBD-II) on automobiles," said ICS-CERT experts in an alert released last month.
[...] The research was presented last month at the DIMVA conference in Bonn, Germany. The technical paper detailing the flaw in depth is available here and here. A YouTube video recorded by Trend Micro researcher Federico Maggi is available.
Source: Bleeping Computer
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Friday August 18 2017, @08:50PM (1 child)
Most lights will do as well, many can be disassembled from the outside to expose the CAN bus.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Grishnakh on Friday August 18 2017, @08:55PM
If you're talking about taillights, all the taillights I've seen lately are still pretty simple, with on/off wires going to them. There's no bus there. The bus goes to the Body Control Module, which is somewhere inside the car. Now if you're talking about HID headlights that might have a CAN bus connection, most cars these days have made it extremely difficult to even change the bulbs on these things; usually you have to remove the the bumper, or take apart the wheelwell, or something like that to get to just the bulb. It's probably easier to just break into the car's cabin if you're trying to be sneaky.