Miller and Valasek have published all the information for hacking cars

Charlie Miller (Twitter security, former NSA hacker, left) and Chris Valasek (IOActive consulting company)

Security specialists Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek are well known in the hacker community. They repeatedly spoke at conferences with reports on vulnerabilities in car computers. Perhaps their most famous presentation was the 2014 Jeep Cherokee hacking two years ago with remote control of some vehicle functions. After that presentation, the automaker had to withdraw almost 1.5 million cars worldwide to replace the firmware.

Tellingly, the first firmware replacement was not very successful. With the new firmware, the possibility of hacking by car has only increased. Then I had to change it again.
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Two years after that story, the hackers laid out almost a step-by-step guide on cracking a Jeep Cherokee, as well as tools and documentation on cracking other cars with a CAN bus.

Hackers are not the first time doing this. In 2013, after demonstrating the management of the 2010 Toyota Prius and 2010 Ford Escape cars with a laptop and Nintendo gamepad, they presented a detailed report describing the hacking technique and published the program code for the car computer exploit (ECU) using the Controller Area Network (CAN) packet transmission .

Apparently, it was their first experience of successful car hacking. The results of that experiment are described in the fundamental work “Adventures in Automotive Networks and Control Units” . This is the first thing worth reading when studying the works of Miller and Valasek. They themselves put a link to a selection of articles on the safety of embedded automotive systems as a must read.

The second work of Miller and Valasek - " Hacking cars for the poor ." It explains how to make the ECU work outside the car and use the tools described in previous work to study the CAN bus messages and launch an attack.


An attempt to save the Jeep after the hackers turned off its brakes in remote mode. Experiment 2015

The most voluminous work is devoted to a general analysis of approaches to cracking cars. The authors emphasize that they do not have the ability to check each model separately and they cannot draw conclusions about the presence of vulnerabilities in them, but for all modern car computers there are certain standard attack vectors that can be used. In this work, Miller and Valasek also give recommendations to automakers on the development of safe systems.

The 2015 public access to Jeep Cherokee hacking and a general guide on the injection of commands into the CAN bus (06/28/2016) with a description of methods for handling conflicting teams of automotive computers were published. The fact is that introducing your teams into the tire is not a problem, but at the same time, the driver does not stop the flow of authentic commands on the same bus. As a result, for example, a command is received from the hacker to turn off the braking system, and from the driver, the command to brake, and the computer has to cope with such situations.

Published documents are a gold mine for car hackers who want to experiment with their cars. According to published works, you can track the chronology of car hacks: from unpretentious hacks with a change in the speedometer and the inclusion of wipers to control the machine through the injection of arbitrary commands into the CAN bus. The described attack methods are generally suitable not only for Jeep Cherokee, but also for many other models. The researchers simply did not have the opportunity to experiment with other machines, they studied exactly the one that was available. It is quite reasonable to assume that the injection of commands for CAN works in many automotive systems, if properly connected to the ECU.

The Fiat Chrysler auto concern in 2015 recalled the following car models for firmware replacement: 2013-2015 MY Dodge Viper 2013-2015 Ram 1500, 2500 and 3500, pick-ups 2013-2015 Ram 3500, 4500, 5500 Chassis Cabs, 2014-2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee and Cherokee SUV, 2014-2015 Dodge Durango SUV, 2015 MY Chrysler 200, Chrysler 300 and 2015 Dodge Charger sedans, Dodge Challenger sports coupe

Of course, great knowledge and great responsibility. You should not remotely turn off the brakes or pedal the gas in a car that does not belong to you. And even more so you should not use this knowledge to steal other people's cars, as the hijackers in Houston, who stole more than 100 Dodge and Jeep cars, armed with a laptop ( video ).