A car hacking experiment: When connectivity meets vulnerability

Abstract

Interconnected vehicles are a growing commodity providing remote access to onboard systems for monitoring and controlling the state of the vehicle. Such features are built to facilitate and strengthen the owner’s knowledge about its car but at the same time they impact its safety and security. Vehicles are not ready to be fully connected as various attacks are currently possible against their control systems. In this paper, we analyse possible attack scenarios on a recently released all-electric car and investigate their impact on real life driving scenarios. We leverage our findings to change the behaviour of safety critical components of the vehicle in order to achieve autonomous driving using an Open Vehicle Monitoring System. Furthermore, to demonstrate the potential of our setup, we developed a novel mobile application able to control such vehicle systems remotely through the Internet. We challenge the current state-of-the-art technology in today’s vehicles and provide a vulnerability analysis on modern embedded systems.

Publication
IEEE Wireless Networking, Control and Positioning for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles