🚘 Can You HACK a CAR?

In an earlier episode, talking about smart cities with Ernesto Sánchez, the topic of cars came up, and it left me with a nasty little question: could an angry ex run us off the road from a distance? To settle it I sit down with two people who have spent years getting their hands into the electronics of cars.

Amador Aparicio and Jordi Serra started researching car hacking in 2017. They met on a cybersecurity master’s that Jordi ran, and it even led to a doctoral thesis. They got hold of an engine control unit (an ECU) from a scrapyard, powered it with a homemade twelve-volt supply and listened to it with an oscilloscope. They explain the OBD2 port and the CAN bus, why you can inject traffic and flood the bus, and how key fobs are copied by radio frequency to open high-end cars. Their reference point was the famous 2015 Jeep hack by Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek.

They leave one reassuring message and one unsettling one: actually hacking a car is extremely hard and slow (they proved it with a 2014 Renault Megane), but as long as there is software there will be flaws. We talk about network segmentation, eCall, the autonomous car, the privacy your car keeps leaking, and why it is worth treating a car as critical infrastructure. If you are wondering whether your car can be hacked, the short answer is yes.