[quirkySquirt]

Wonder if you could have a bolt-on [teehee] AV add-on with it's own sensors to augment those already on the Bolt that could control the Bolt for you.

 

[GJETSON]

Thankfully, not OTA. Does anybody here think GM could keep this secure? Elon claims he can. He claims lots of things.

 

[Pete Blair]

Until just a few years ago Onstar was vulnerable to being hacked over the air, which did give the hackers 100% access to all the vehicle control system. It would not surprise me if there are still undiscovered vulnerabilities in the Onstar system. I certainly hope there isn't but it's happened before.

 

[quirkySquirt]

until just a few years ago onstar was vulnerable to being hacked over the air, which did give the hackers 100% access to all the vehicle control system. It would not surprise me if there are still undiscovered vulnerabilities in the onstar system. I certainly hope there isn't but it's happened before.

dun-dun-dun!
Seriously, I wonder what could be done should someone actually take control of the steering. I doubt we're strong enough to oppose the power steering, so pretty much we could only power off the Bolt then steer an unassisted steering wheel to safety?

I remember having to push a dead sedan before and when it was my turn to get a break and guide the car, it wasn't much of a break when I had to make a right-angle turn onto another street. Hydraulic steering assist is a blessing.

 

[Pete Blair]

dun-dun-dun!
Seriously, I wonder what could be done should someone actually take control of the steering. I doubt we're strong enough to oppose the power steering, so pretty much we could only power off the Bolt then steer an unassisted steering wheel to safety?

I remember having to push a dead sedan before and when it was my turn to get a break and guide the car, it wasn't much of a break when I had to make a right-angle turn onto another street. Hydraulic steering assist is a blessing.

Yeah I believe you are correctly assuming we would not be able to overpower the power steering in the car.

Far as what we do, I guess it depends on how advanced the attack is. If I was writing the code for the attack the first thing I would have it do upon gaining control of the system would be to lock the driver out from controlling anything. The power button is just that, a button that sends a signal, there is nothing physical there to turn the car off. So if you had control over the cars complete system you could either ignore requests coming in from those controls or just outright disable them.

So if there was an attack and it was well done, I don't think there is anything you could do if someone took control of your car while you were driving.

Certainly a frightening proposition. Hopefully Onstar has their act together or Chevy changed how onstar interacts with the Bolt, not giving it direct access to control systems in the car. I don't know the system architecture of the car, at a software and hardware level. I hope Onstar is sandboxed away from the control systems now.

 

[GJETSON]

Notice that these guys are using the OBD port to do this stuff. The OBD is not accessible OTA is it? I assume that is deliberate on GM's part to prevent the situations you folks are imagining.

 

[raitchison]

dun-dun-dun!Hydraulic steering assist is a blessing.

This is true but it's also worth noting that a true manual steering rack (not designed for power steering) is a LOT easier to use than a power steering rack with no power. Not sure if there are even any cars sold in the U.S. that have manual steering racks anymore, the last car I had that had one was my 1994 Geo Metro.

 

[Pete Blair]

Notice that these guys are using the OBD port to do this stuff. The OBD is not accessible OTA is it? I assume that is deliberate on GM's part to prevent the situations you folks are imagining.

I wasn't talking about what these guys are doing. I was talking about the Onstar issue that was known about for over 5 years before it was fixed. It was fixed back in 2015 but discovered in 2010. You could remotely access a car equipped with Onstar and do pretty much anything the computer could control.

I was merely mentioning that I hoped there were no other Onstar bugs present that would make it hackable.

 

[GJETSON]

I
I was merely mentioning that I hoped there were no other Onstar bugs present that would make it hackable.

Me too. There was a piece a month or so back about hacking into cars, on NPR. They went out into the parking lot with a hacker and he opened the doors to somebodies Bolt. That isn't OnStar, but any wireless connection to cars is a danger.

I'd be terrified in a Tesla. They have got to be a real target for hackers.

 

[quirkySquirt]

Far as what we do, I guess it depends on how advanced the attack is. If I was writing the code for the attack the first thing I would have it do upon gaining control of the system would be to lock the driver out from controlling anything. The power button is just that, a button that sends a signal, there is nothing physical there to turn the car off. So if you had control over the cars complete system you could either ignore requests coming in from those controls or just outright disable them.

So if there was an attack and it was well done, I don't think there is anything you could do if someone took control of your car while you were driving.

This is where I hope the engineers designed a proper power button. It's been a while since I worked in a PC repair shop, but an engineering colleague mentioned a circuit in some PC power supplies--I think an ATX one when they first came out, or maybe an AT one with advanced power button features--that on a single press was truly a signal but teed off that signal wire was a capacitor or something such that as you held the power button down, the capacitor would charge over a priod of a few seconds until it became a short circuit triggering an electrically isolated switching path back to the power supply that triggered a relay to turn off the power supply.

I'm hoping GM did the same thing so should someone take over the Bolt (or any GM car), per the manual you can hold down the power button until it turns off HARD. Even if you intercept the button press signal, you are still slowly triggering electrically another fail safe that is not computer controlled.

 

[raitchison]

Poorly shot video with no details aside this gives me hope that we might be able to hack into our own cars to for example enable functionality that GM thought we were all entirely too stupid to handle (such as semi-comprehensive charging controls & battery information).

 

[Pete Blair]

This is where I hope the engineers designed a proper power button. It's been a while since I worked in a PC repair shop, but an engineering colleague mentioned a circuit in some PC power supplies--I think an ATX one when they first came out, or maybe an AT one with advanced power button features--that on a single press was truly a signal but teed off that signal wire was a capacitor or something such that as you held the power button down, the capacitor would charge over a priod of a few seconds until it became a short circuit triggering an electrically isolated switching path back to the power supply that triggered a relay to turn off the power supply.

I'm hoping GM did the same thing so should someone take over the Bolt (or any GM car), per the manual you can hold down the power button until it turns off HARD. Even if you intercept the button press signal, you are still slowly triggering electrically another fail safe that is not computer controlled.

I tried searching around to see if there was any information about their being a fail safe on the power button in the car, nothing comes up. Doesn't mean it isn't there but the only information in the manual about turning the car off while driving says to either hold the button for two seconds or hit it twice within 5 seconds and the car will shut down. Doesn't say anything about hardware fail safes.

 

[Justine Haupt]

Hello all,

This is my first post here (just bought a used 2017 Bolt w/28k miles in excellent condition for 20k, yipee!). Previous Honda Fit EV owner.

Anyway, I'm trying to find more information on how they interfaced with the Bolt. There's a lot of discussion here about plausibility of OTA hacking, etc, but I don't care about that... I care about using the pre-existing steering, brake, and accelerator drive-by-wire system to experiment with open source autonomous lane keeping and adaptive cruise control, with supplemental cameras or LIDAR.

I see that the guys in the video are running Ubuntu on the laptop and I don't doubt that they did in fact tap into the car's control system (that is, the video clearly wasn't faked). I'm an engineer/roboticist and inevitably I'll be wanting to play around with my Bolt at some point. I'm sending an email to the fellow who posted the email now, so if anyone's interested in progress on this front I'll try to post back here.

~Justine

 

[XJ12]

@Justine Haupt welcome to the forum. Check out this:

A more or less self driving 2019 Chevy Bolt, THIS...

Open Pilot project. Pretty impressive work. Hats off to these guys.

www.chevybolt.org

 

[Justine Haupt]

Hi XJ12,

I JUST discovered the openpilot project and was coming back here to edit my post. This is extremely exciting.