Picture the scene. It’s rush hour in London, on a Tuesday in the not too distant future. All of a sudden, hundreds of cars grind to a halt, and cannot be moved. There are hundreds of instant collisions, with the knock-on effects of pile-ups, traffic chaos and millions in lost business.
It’s a Saturday morning, about a month later. The web is buzzing with reports that tens of thousands of cars in Tokyo have been involved in left turn collisions.
The next morning, headlines focus on reports that thousands of cars in Los Angeles appear to have been started up during the night, seemingly of their own accord.
A month later, there’s a spate of collisions in several major cities caused by sudden unintended acceleration. Speculation begins to connect these occurrences to the seemingly unrelated hacking of drivers’ credit card details, social media and music streaming accounts.
Cyber security could be a turning point for the automotive industry, the key automotive issue in 2015. This is no Millennium Bug; there’s a clear and present danger
Investigations get under way, and eventually it’s confirmed as the work of a hacker. Amidst the ensuing panic, it’s reported that every car with voice control technology has had the in-car microphones in a constant state of activation for months; unofficial sources suggest that thousands of hours of intimate and politically sensitive conversations have been recorded.
The source is tracked down, but identity and motive are withheld, with several governments citing national security.
Naturally, conspiracy theories abound.
Some say it’s government-sponsored international terrorism; others are sure it’s an act of so-called hacktivism, by an organisation with a point to make and a savvy IT team. Some believe the hacker’s route in to all these cars was via an Internet of Things connected appliance; the tabloid press blames a combination of connected fridges, connected heating, and even a weakness in smartwatch-based security protocols. Not so, say others still – it was just a kid who found and exploited a worm hole in a piece of code and wanted to make a name for himself, without realising the true consequences: lost lives, countless injuries, massive repair costs to cars and surrounding buildings, and billions wiped off stock market values.
Can we even consider autonomous cars if we haven’t resolved the issue of automotive cyber security?
Fiction? Fantasy? Paranoia?
Maybe not. Ask the hackers – those on the legitimate, hackathon side of the fence, of course – and their anecdotes will give you goose bumps. Ask the OEMs and the suppliers, and they’ll point to their security and information executives and their cyber security teams. Ask the owners of cars that have needed over the air update patches to fix security glitches. Ask the governments setting up task forces to ensure that cyber crime doesn’t become the issue that derails their V2V and V2X plans. Ask even the organisers and delegates of the growing number automotive cyber security-focused conferences.
Cyber security could be a turning point for the automotive industry, the key automotive issue in 2015. This is no Millennium Bug; there’s a clear and present danger. Get it right now, and it can set up the connected car of the future. Fail to secure the connected car, and we risk everything that this technology can offer.
The move to mass connectivity is well under way. The quest for the autonomous car occupies engineers at every OEM and supplier. But can we have autonomous cars – can we even consider autonomous cars – if we haven’t resolved the issue of automotive cyber security?
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Martin Kahl is Editor, Automotive World
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