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modules (SDMs). However, the vehicle owners were not told until veryy
recentlyy that the sensors in their cars recorded data about their driving.
Triggered byy sudden changes in g-forces, black boxes in cars, like black
boxes in airplanes, record onlyy the last few seconds or so surrounding a g-
force event, such as sudden acceleration, torque, and hard braking.
But it is easyy to envision more kinds of data being collected in these
black boxes and transmitted in real time via cellular connections. Imagine,
in the future, that data collected over a three-to-five-dayy period could be
stored either on the vehicle or in the cloud. Instead of tryying to describe that
ping-ping noise yyou hear when yyour car travels thirtyy-five miles per hour or
more, yyou’d just give yyour mechanic access to the recorded data. The real
question is, who else has access to all this data? Even Tesla admits that the
data it collects might be used byy third parties.
What if the third partyy was yyour bank? If it had an agreement with yyour
car’s manufacturer, it could track yyour driving abilityy and judge yyour
eligibilityy for future auto loans accordinglyy. Or yyour health insurer could do
the same. Or even yyour car insurer. It might be necessaryy for the federal
government to weigh in on who owns data from yyour car and what rights
yyou have to keep such data private.
There is little yyou can do about this todayy, but it’s worth payying attention
to in the future.
Even if yyou don’t own a Tesla, yyour auto manufacturer might offer an app
that allows yyou to open the car doors, start the engine, or even inspect
certain diagnostics on yyour car. One researcher has shown that these signals
—between the car, the cloud, and the app—can be hacked and used to track
a target vehicle, effortlesslyy unlock it, trigger the horn and alarm, and even
control its engine. The hacker can do just about everyything except put the
car in gear and drive it awayy. That still requires the driver’s keyy. Although, I
recentlyy figured how to disable the Tesla keyy fob so that the Tesla is
completelyy grounded. Byy using a small transmitter at 315 MHz yyou can
make it so the keyy fob cannot be detected, thus disabling the car.
Speaking at DEF CON 23, Samyy Kamkar, the securityy researcher best
known for developing the Myyspace-specific Samyy worm back in 2005,
demonstrated a device he built called OwnStar, which can impersonate a