| Book by Craig Smith; review by Ralph Grabowski |
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When I bought my new car four years ago, it was 11 years old. I had spent a year thinking about what I wanted. Out of the universe of world of car models, I narrowed them down to an old mini-SUV, and when a guy in the next street put his 1999 Honda CR-V up for sale, I snapped it up -- after convincing my wife of the need, naturally.
Why an old car? Old cars have a classic look that no longer goes out of fashion. From having bought a string of 10-year-old cars for family members, I learned that most anything that will go wrong has already been fixed by the previous owner, and so I end up with a largely trouble-free vehicle. Plus, there's that $30,000 savings over buying a brand-new model.
The hood ornament on the case: old cars lack extensive electronics. I got fully freaked out after twice renting Fords with all-encompassing touch screens. Imagine being in a new rental navigating the spaghetti that passes for roads exiting airports while tapping with one eye on touch screen menus to merely lower the heat to satisfy the complaining back seat passengers. Navigating menus while driving wasn't sufficient; Ford required me to repeatedly tap a dot to change the temp -- in half-degree increments. Really?
It's the ability to twisting a temp knob by touch (not taking eyes off road) that took me back to turn-of-the-millennium vehicles. The comfort of remote locks, yes; the horror of tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap screens, no.
Today's cars, however, cannot escape the lure of electronics the way I was able to. All of them pocess an backbone that connects USB ports, Bluetooth transmitters, proximity sensors, GPS receivers, LTE (cell phone and data), media centers, those awful touch screens, and yes even remote locks to each other. Some vehicles even use the ethernet standard we are familiar with from our offices.
Most cars, however, use the CAN interface, short for Controller Area Network. This is a two-speed network -- slow speed for non-critical functions like remote locks, and fast data speed for functions like crash detection for air bag deployment.
The reason for two speeds is cost and interference. Slower network speeds allow the use of lower-cost controllers; slower speeds are somewhat more resistant to interference and so need less insulation. Automobiles are notorious for generating spurious electrical impulses that interfere with radio and network transmissions. The latest version of CAN allows for variable data rates, so that data can be transmitted faster and slower upon demand.
 Image couresty www.flexautomotive.net
(Bosch invented CAN, allowed it to become a standard, and it was first deployed in 1988 -- in a BMW, naturally. Bosch, by the way, develops a lot of the sensors used today by self-driving cars.)
What good is a network if its data can't be stored. And so all modern cars have a simplified version of the airplane's black box. Except that only about 20 seconds of data are stored, and sometimes only the state of the vehicle is stored at when it was turned off or when it crashed. Data includes fuel and air metering, emissions, ignition system misfires, vehicle speed controls, and the state of the transmission.
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To access the data in a car, you plug an analyzer into the OBD (on-board diagnostics) port, usually located under the steering wheel. This is an acronym you probably recognize, as pollution detection is done through this port. In Europe, the port is called EOBD -- European OBD -- and in Japan JOBD, and so on, but they all act nearly the same as regular ORD.
The problem is that CAN supports no security functions. Which is why you get the stories in the popular media of hackers controlling vehicle functions remotely. The problem reaches the severe level as new cars feature ever larger numbers of interfaces: hackers are no longer limited to physically connecting to the OBD, but can attack through Bluetooth, LTE, Android Auto, or even the remote fob. Some CAN buses control the tail lights (to monitor if they burn out), and so the vehicle can be attacked electronically by attaching a connector to the tail light socket.
Yes, even key fobs can be hacked, such as passing it garbage data at 315MHz to jam it -- or lock and unlock the car remotely. Key fobs use a challenge-response system to ensure the vehicle is communicating with the correct fob, but foolishly the last challenge and correct response are sometimes stored in the fob. Yup, that's how insecure cars are. Even as I am writing this review, Germany's ADAC auto club reported on how they extended the range of key fobs to 300 feet using a pair of radios that cost $225, allowing them to break into and drive away 24 out of 25 vehicle models tested. ("The VDA, a German automakers’ group, downplayed the ADAC’s findings.") See http://www.wired.com/2016/03/study-finds-24-car-models-open-unlocking-ignition-hack.
The problem worsens as manufacturers move from firmware (where code is burned into unalterable silicon) to updateable programming code. Recall Nissan frantically removing its zero-security smartphone app for connecting to its electric car.
To learn how to modify a car's programming, you turn to The Car Hacker's Handbook. "Hacker" here is its original "white hat" meaning, in which we see how it is possible to modify a computer system. (My first ever hardware hack was soldering a wire onto a diskette controller board so that it would support double-sided drives; cheaper than paying for a whole new board.)
Craig Smith details how the CAN network works, and the software and hardware needed to modify the software running inside your car. There are a lot of vehicle models and so --- like computers -- they have code that differs between models. The first thing you need to figure out is the model so you know how to enter the system. Mr Smith describes how to do this for new models that haven't been documented yet; for older vehicles, someone probably has done it and he provides Web sites that list the needed information.
As my car-fixing neighbor said, it might be time for him to get beyond the carburator era and read this book. I got through reading it in a couple of hours on a weekend, because much of it is actual code. If you get serious about looking into your vehicle's CAN bus, you will need to use Linux (because CAN runs on Linux) and C-code programming. Mr Smith lists third-party programs that can do much of the work for you, but they can be expensive (up to $2,000) and so doing your own coding is an alternative, as described in this book.
The Car Hacker's Handbook: A Guide for the Penetration Tester
by Craig Smith
No Starch Press
xxvi+278pp; $49.95
ISBN 978-1-59327-703-1 |
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MachineWorks reports that its Polygonica version 1.3 program will get support for Linux and Macintosh operating systems. The software is used for automatic mesh healing, Boolean operations, mesh offsetting, mesh simplification, mesh analysis and rendering. “In particular, Polygonica is well suited to cloud based mesh processing tasks for 3D printing and CAE, and many cloud platforms are based on Linux," says Dr David Knight, Polygonica sales manager.
Polygonica for Linux and Mac is currently available in beta form for selected customers and partners, and general availability will commence in Q2 2016.http://www.polygonica.com |
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Re: The Rendering Challenges IKEA Faces
Wow -- that is so cool! I’d love to do that kind of 3D work. And “Earthquake mode.” Genius! So I’m guessing that they are going to this level of modeling so that they can allow interaction on the website, or place their products in animated movies or games, or maybe as furniture and appliance placement to architects and designers? I find it hard to believe that this kind of investment is paying off compared to photography, but I really don’t know the photography field that well.
I also loved their adding gravity. I find it hard to put parts together in some of my models too. I end up adding a lot of planes to get the job done sometimes. And I embed vertical or horizontal lines into my AutoCAD 3D faces and meshes so that OSNAPS can find the critical attachment points.
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