NSA in Your NSX: Your Car is a Data Breach Waiting to Happen

Steph Willems
by Steph Willems

Your faithful four-wheeled companion — the one that costs you an arm and a leg but you still love it — has the data-gathering potential to make your life a Kafkaesque nightmare.

Researchers have found that a car’s computer network can identify a driver just by the way they operate the vehicle. Even something as simple as the brake pedal can pinpoint who’s behind the wheel, according to a report published in Wired.

A study crafted by researchers at the University of Washington and the University of California at San Diego will be presented at a tech symposium in Germany this July. In it, they analyzed data from vehicles driven by test subjects, probing their computer systems (known as the CAN bus) for clues.

Feedback from the brake pedal alone allowed the team to identify a specific driver out of a 15-person test pool with 90 percent accuracy. Checking other driver inputs over a longer period of time (90 minutes) brought that figure up to 100 percent.

“With very limited amounts of driving data we can enable very powerful and accurate inferences about the driver’s identity,” Miro Enev, a former University of Washington researcher, told the publication.

Forget about the government peering through your blinds at night, and never mind your cell phone or cable provider. Your car is keeping tabs on you.

Now that a vehicle can identify its driver, inevitable fears arise about that faithful companion ratting you out to the authorities. Changes in the way a driver pilots his or her vehicle can point to a medical condition, an impaired state, even the wrong person behind the wheel of a rental. For now, though, the evidence stays tucked away in the vehicle’s data bank.

That might not be the case for very long. Some insurance companies already allow drivers to offer up their car’s data in exchange for lower rates, while other drivers enjoy uploading their data to the cloud via devices that plug in to the CAN bus.

That data can then be seen by third parties.

If vehicles become able to upload their own data to the Internet, the privacy risk grows. How free are you willing to be with your car’s data?

Because of the risk, security measures should be built into any gadget designed to measure a single function, such a gas mileage, Enev said.

[Source: Wired (via Autofocus)] [Image: rh2ox/ Flickr]

Steph Willems
Steph Willems

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  • Scoutdude Scoutdude on May 30, 2016

    Sorry but way too much is being read into this. The car's computer just doesn't store that much information on how it was operated for long periods of time. You'll note that they achieved this result by monitoring and storing the data from the CAN bus on an external device, they did not retrieve data from the car's computer after the fact. Also it isn't something that will carry over from one vehicle to another as people will tend to drive different vehicles in different manners. For example I regularly drive my wife's Hybrid, my Panther and my Econoline. How I brake (and drive in general) in each one is different with the hybrid I do try to maximize fuel economy by getting the engine to shut off and hopefully maximize regen braking while minimizing the use of the friction braking. The Econoline is usually hauling something in the back at least one of the directions and drive accordingly.

  • Cbrworm Cbrworm on May 31, 2016

    This could be useful for the car. Cars now have many adaptive systems that adjust to the way you drive. Then someone else drives your car and the adaptive values start to change. If a car could store the values for a few regular drivers and keep the adaptive values tied to each driver, it could make the systems work better for you. I drive in two distinctly different modes. I drive one way when I have kids or customers in the car, totally differently if I am alone. If my car could realize the difference and automatically switch (instead of slowly adjusting), it would probably make my transmission last longer if nothing else. As for big brother knowing how I drive, I have no interest in my vehicle being connected to anything aside from my iPod.

    • WheelMcCoy WheelMcCoy on May 31, 2016

      @cbrworm - "As for big brother knowing how I drive, I have no interest in my vehicle being connected to anything aside from my iPod." Agreed. It's not so much tin-foli hat territory as it is just another piece of personal data out there for someone to connect the dots and then exploit. To make me even more concerned, I ran across this article in government technology: "Of the IT personnel surveyed, only 8 percent said cybersecurity was unimportant or very unimportant. But in human resources, that number was 39 percent; in purchasing and procurement that number was 41 percent; and in communications and public relations it was 48 percent. " Are these people for real? Or was the survey done badly? Complete article here: http://www.govtech.com/security/One-Year-After-OPM-Breach-Federal-Cybersecurity-Continues-to-Struggle.html

  • CanadaCraig You can just imagine how quickly the tires are going to wear out on a 5,800 lbs AWD 2024 Dodge Charger.
  • Luke42 I tried FSD for a month in December 2022 on my Model Y and wasn’t impressed.The building-blocks were amazing but sum of the all of those amazing parts was about as useful as Honda Sensing in terms of reducing the driver’s workload.I have a list of fixes I need to see in Autopilot before I blow another $200 renting FSD. But I will try it for free for a month.I would love it if FSD v12 lived up to the hype and my mind were changed. But I have no reason to believe I might be wrong at this point, based on the reviews I’ve read so far. [shrug]. I’m sure I’ll have more to say about it once I get to test it.
  • FormerFF We bought three new and one used car last year, so we won't be visiting any showrooms this year unless a meteor hits one of them. Sorry to hear that Mini has terminated the manual transmission, a Mini could be a fun car to drive with a stick.It appears that 2025 is going to see a significant decrease in the number of models that can be had with a stick. The used car we bought is a Mk 7 GTI with a six speed manual, and my younger daughter and I are enjoying it quite a lot. We'll be hanging on to it for many years.
  • Oberkanone Where is the value here? Magna is assembling the vehicles. The IP is not novel. Just buy the IP at bankruptcy stage for next to nothing.
  • Jalop1991 what, no Turbo trim?
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