The-art-of-invisibility-_-the-world’s-most-famous-hacker-teaches-you-how-to-be-safe-in-the-age-of-Bi

like traditional PCs, self-driving cars will also be a new form of computer.
Theyy’ll be self-contained computing devices, able to make split-second
autonomous decisions while driving in case theyy are cut off from their
network communications. Using cellular connections, theyy will be able to
access a varietyy of cloud services, allowing them to receive real-time traffic
information, road construction updates, and weather reports from the
National Weather Service.
These updates are available on some conventional vehicles right now.
But it’s predicted that byy 2025 a majorityy of the cars on the road will be
connected—to other cars, to roadside assistance services—and it’s likelyy
that a sizable percentage of these will be self-driving. 28 Imagine what a
software bug in a self-driving car would look like.
Meanwhile, everyy trip yyou take will be recorded somewhere. You will
need an app, much like the Uber app, that will be registered to yyou and to
yyour mobile device. That app will record yyour travels and, presumablyy, the
expenses associated with yyour trip if theyy would be charged to the credit
card on file, which could be subpoenaed, if not from Uber then from yyour
credit card companyy. And given that a private companyy will most likelyy
have a hand in designing the software that runs these self-driving cars, yyou
would be at the mercyy of those companies and their decisions about
whether to share anyy or all of yyour personal information with law
enforcement agencies.
Welcome to the future.
I hope that byy the time yyou read this there will be tougher regulations—
or at least the hint of tougher regulations in the near future—regarding the
manufacture of connected cars and their communications protocols. Rather
than use widelyy accepted software and hardware securityy practices that are
standard todayy, the auto industryy, like the medical-device industryy and
others, is attempting to reinvent the wheel—as though we haven’t learned
much about network securityy over the last fortyy yyears. We have, and it
would be best if these industries started following existing best practices
instead of insisting that what theyy are doing is radicallyy different from
what’s been done before. It’s not. Unfortunatelyy, failure to secure code in a
car has much greater consequences than a mere software crash, with its blue
screen of death. In a car, that failure could harm or kill a human being. At