Thursday, April 7, 2016

Security for car computers

New company aims to provide it:
Car security startup Karamba Security has emerged from stealth with $2.5m in funding and a plan to revamp in-car security. 
Karamba has developed a technology that hardens the externally-facing electronic control unit (ECU) of cars in order to defend against hack attacks. The software is designed to protect a car's externally connected components, identifying attack attempts and blocking exploits from infiltrating the vehicle's network via the internet, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or other connections. 
Externally facing controllers manage the telematics (sensors, instrumentation, navigation, etc), infotainment (radio, head unit, etc) and on-board diagnostics (OBD) of the vehicle. Karamba's tech is designed to block attacks from ever infiltrating the car's controller area network (CAN Bus). The technology ensures that only explicitly allowed code and applications can be loaded and run on the controller
This seems entirely sensible.  When I replace the Jeep, I may look into one of these.

1 comment:

R.K. Brumbelow said...

For the life of me, I simply do not understand why critical systems need publicly facing interfaces that accept programming.

Using nuclear power stations as an example: it is fine for a nuclear plant to have a web page. Let it be hosted in a different facility on an external, unconnected I trusted network.

For vehicles, why does the entertainment system need to talk to the drive system? Is it really important to save a few cycles and not have overlap? Braking, fuel management etc does not need to know what Justin briber song was on the last station I scanned through while trying to drive from class to home in the radio dead zone between Carrollton and Bremen, ga.