New US rules on 'vehicle-to-vehicle' communications under consultation Car manufacturers active in the US market will need to ensure new models are fitted with technology that allows those vehicles to "talk" to other vehicles from as early as 2021, under new government proposals. The US Department of Transportation (DoT) has opened a 90-day consultation on a new Federal Motor Vehicle Safety …
Righhhttt... So they're proposing a trust based uncontrolled ad hoc messaging system. It's trust based because you (or your car's systems) will have no real way to definitively trust the identity and therefore the content of any message received. It's an uncontrolled ad-hoc system because connections between individual nodes will be made and dropped based on external physical circumstances, for example oncoming cars on the same road, cars turning on or off the road and cars coming in and out of range for any other reason. It will be interesting to see how this works, particularly where multi-layer or otherwise independent roads have vehicles that can communicate with each other. Just the "safety" side of round the corner notifications would require a reasonable communication range and this will lead to irrelevant messages from vehicles on unconnected roads.
V2V is a great concept in principal but the only secure design is not to trust any of your inputs which defeats much of the point.
Signatures don't prevent spoofed messages as it won't be hard to trick a legitimate unit from sending incorrect messages. e.g. presumably their will be a heavy breaking warning message which will then cause other drivers to react, so remove the unit from a car and then feed it with sensor data telling it that breaks have suddenly been applied.
Definitely agree about identifying what road cars are on and so which messages are relevant. It isn't unusual (in the UK at least) for a minor road to be running right next to a motorway and often GPS doesn't always know which road you are on (even ignoring the fact that gps signal can be spoofed). If someone drives along this road, slam on breaks will that cause all the cars on the motorway to also break?
Of course it will happen because the police and security services will love having every car broadcasting their identify for anyone to sniff. Who needs ANPR and all those pesky rules, this won't be number plate recognition so I'm sure they'll claim the current rules don't apply...
So long as the messages are informational, like "cars a half mile ahead are going 10 mph, prepare to slow down" so you don't top a hill and have to slam on your brakes because an accident caused a traffic jam, that's fine. Worst case, they make you slow down when you don't need to and a miscreant can cause a traffic jam by doing so.
I'd be more worried about the tracking aspects. At least with a cellular connection for something like OnStar, I can clip a wire and disable that. Something like this, it will probably be against federal law to disable it.
Or idiots that forget the line at the bottom of the slip road is a giveway line (amazing there is usually no queue to get on the m25, just a huge queue on the m25 as people force their way on regardless....
But anyway, the idiots who wont move over already wont for lights and horn so what makes you think they might for a polite message? I have found a much bigger, much older, already battered looking car is a most efficient way of moving people... an occasional bump might be needed but when they see the state of the car nudging them they usually give way
and vehicle manufacturers would also be required to provide customers with a privacy notice that explains how data from those devices might be collected, stored, used and accessed.
"Dear Customer, we will use data about you in any way we see fit, including (but not limited to) flogging it for any purpose, handing it over to the security apparatus of any and all governments, and leaving an unencrypted memory stick containing it on a train."
Get the lawyers to rewrite that in impenetrable legalize and then it is job done - tick in the box!
So your car is basically going to connect and receive messages from any number of other sensors on the road with you? Do you know how easy it is going to be to spoof other cars and stall every car for 100-200 feet, since they all "see" a car in their path that is not there?
...you, the driver, slow down, you are coming up on something that you probably want to gawk at. It is really nothing, but the government wants you to know so you can start slowing down now. Sure, it is 3 miles down the road, but slow down, NOW! Be sure to get your phone ready to take pictures - it could be something interesting, but probably not. BTW, pay not attention to the cars made before 2021 that are not getting this message. They may be pissed off, flipping your off, swerving around you, running into you (because you read this message and hit the brakes), but that is fine.
"The DoT said that mandating V2V communications could add $300 to the cost of making each vehicle, but that it would save up to $71 billion as a result of lowering the number of vehicle collisions."
So is that a savings or not? How many billions per year is $300/vehicle, or how much per vehicle is $71 billion? The figures sound impressive but they're in completely different frames of reference, so can't be directly compared.
Also, dollar figures are fine, but presumably one of the costs of collisions is lives lost. How many lives saved are we talking about? How many permanent disabilities?
For that matter, there may be other costs associated with the addition of the new system, some of which have been enumerated by my fellow commenters. Who will be paying for attack mitigation? How many people will be late to important meetings because of some script kiddies?
The mind boggles!
Without a mandatory standardized compliance format we are doomed to more halfazzed comm designs that will cause motorist problems. The car-to-car chaos is nothing compared to the autonomous vehicle disaster headed our way where there are no mandated safety, security, maintenance or inspection standards for autonomous vehicles.
Amazon did their first drone delivery in the UK where the government has embraced AVs as the next gold chest to be harvested - without any safety, security, etc. mandates. We're in for some serious mobility issues with all of these unregulated new transportation systems. Instead of being proactive the world wide governments will try to put the Genie back in the bottle after the carnage gets serious and real in a short time span.
DDoS originating from the M25 and a 21st century version of The Italian Job telling every carin a city to 'Stop Now' except for those on the getaway route which will be told to pull over for an emergency vehicle.
Don't you just love legislators who learn a bit of popular science and then demand it does some crazy idea they have come up with?
I hate* to be pedantic about this, but there already is a 21st century version of The Italian Job. (Not bad... but also not as good as the 1969 version. Bloody doors and all that.)
* Yes, totally lying through my teeth here. Well spotted.
The police want to be able to stop a car with a push of a button and EMP'ing a car is considered slightly too dangerous, so just getting close enough for the police car to tell the other car to safely stop in this way is perfect for them.
Call me cynical but.....I have no doubts that the police/authorities controlled stop directive will be included in one of the protocol updates if not from the start, and time after time people will crack any protections put in place to stop everyone and their dog being able to do it....
Then the ability will be given to petrol stations to stop fill'n'runners, wheel clamping companies who can go clampless, lollipop ladies and Mr i brought a nice gadget from China.
Well, I'm kinda curious about how massively interested insurance companies are going to become as they will want to grab as much of this telematic / V2V info as they can in order to ramp up insurance rates for all of us.
Gotta have a little profit with this new tech, besides the car makers that is...
HOPEFULLY, some sane senator, congressman, legislator, whomever, will see that that are serious privacy implications here.
And with this new president-elect and the rag-tag cabinet selections, I'm not feeling too confident about our protections here in the U.S.
Elizabeth Warren, can we clone you please - about 300 times....??
I dont want nsa listening in on what my car may or may not be outputting... especially when I will have squat control on it. I would guess one of the main outputs to some listening posts will be who is in it and what speed is it doing so that the speeding fines (obviously the route to saving lives cough cough) will automatically be sent to the driver without the need for cameras, film et al.
Tested recently by US military.. mini drone swarm launched by an FA-18 connected to each other.. forming a distributed hive mind and "did things using GPS for position info..
IMHO= this sounds like an Electric Smart Road to me.. the inferred FFT imaging over all who participate gives everyone participating an extremely fine grain picture of the vehicles, the road, and each vehicles intentions..
Sadly this will never be implemented as each Manufacturer will want to "own" the process.. RS.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
