In the June 7th edition of The Economist (Stop that Car!) General Motors' OnStar plans to allow police access to its Stolen Vehicle Slowdown feature. To quote:
"Police who believe a car to be stolen can ask an OnStar operator to disable its accelerator, while leaving the steering and brakes in working order. Some people worry that hackers might take over the system."
No need to worry. You can bet on it.
But there is more. This scenario highlights the amount of software residing in the typical car (which is a lot, by the way). The transmission in a General Motors vehicle is thought to contain some 30 million lines of code. This is as much as the Microsoft Windows XP operating system. And that's just the transmission.
The fact that this software is networked to a satellite control system is no doubt comforting to anyone who has been in an accident (OnStar calls emergency services automatically when your air bags deploy providing your GPS coordinates) and no doubt enticing to those with a penchant for mischief and mayhem.
It's not so much that attackers may go after the OnStar software itself (which is proprietary and therefore difficult to get at), but all the supporting software like operating systems and internet browsers of those wonderfully helpful OnStar associates (think Salesforce.com). Oh, I can see the phishing attack coming now....
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