(Originally published on LinkedIn in June 2024)
Surely, you must be thinking that as soon as you connect the cars, you also open the can of hacking worms. And you are right … to some extent. Engineers hacking a Tesla was big news in the media some time ago but that doesn’t mean that all the connected cars are hacked right and left. With great power (of connectivity) comes great responsibility (of cyber-security). The engineers who design the connected technologies aren’t stupid. They also (try to) make sure that it’s really hard (if not impossible) to hack the thing. Sad thing is that hackers are smart people too and they sometimes manage to break into the unforeseen gaps and shortcomings. Connected technologies vs hacking has always been an evolutionary competition. The designers try to make the technology unhackable. The hackers come up with a new trick. The designers improve the technology. The hackers improve their attack methods. And so on it goes. The good news is that quantum cryptography promises a hack-free future (though a not-so-near-future). Though, we might not have the creativity just yet to think of the hacking methods for that.
Individual car owners needn’t worry so much about the hacking because the probability of that will be similar to your credit card being compromised. Though, once the compromise happens, the consequences might be worse – in a credit card theft, at worst you lose your money; with connected cars, you might be kidnapped or worse, crashed, by a hacker sitting in some distant part of the world. Also, humanity seems to be moving towards a future where private car ownership is not as popular as today, especially for people living in big cities with little benefit of the car due to long traffic jams and lack of space for parking it (and astronomical prices if you do manage to find a place). In the future, we might have big car fleet operators like Sixt or Uber who offer “mobility as a service” (known as MaaS among us engineers) i.e. instead of paying for car ownership, you pay for mobility subscription where you use the car as and when you need it. If that car fleet is autonomous, you might just be paying for a pay-as-you-go taxi service. And in that case, a cyber event might leave the whole fleet at risk. Remote mass kidnappings then?
A quick note here that mostly we just imagine hacking of a car as someone taking control of the vehicle. But there are some other ways to mess up with these smart, connected and autonomous vehicles. One can “fool” the car sensors in several ways, for example – showing manipulated images to the car camera (just a cardboard cutout of a vehicle rear can make a car brake hard to avoid hitting a “car in front”), sending bad signals to the car radar or fake messages to its V2X receiver to make the car computer believe that there are some obstacles on the road, or jamming the frequency bands of V2X to render the whole system useless. And these are just off the top of my head and I am not even a cyber-security expert.