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Hackers could use connected cars to gridlock whole cities

September 20, 2019

In the year 2026, at rush hour, your self-driving car abruptly shuts down right where it blocks traffic. You climb out to see gridlock down every street in view and then a news alert on your watch tells you that hackers have paralyzed all Manhattan traffic by randomly stranding internet-connected cars.

Flashback to July 2019, the dawn of autonomous vehicles and other connected cars, and physicists at the Georgia Institute of Technology and Multiscale Systems, Inc. have applied physics in a new study to simulate what it would take for future hackers to wreak widespread havoc by randomly stranding these cars. The researchers want to expand the current discussion on automotive cybersecurity to include potential mass mayhem versus the present focus on singular vehicle/individual crashes.

They warn that, even with increasingly tighter cyber defenses, the amount of data breached has soared recently. Moreover, objects like cars becoming hackable can convert the rising cyber threat into a potential physical menace.

“Unlike most of the data breaches we hear about, hacked cars have physical consequences,” said Peter Yunker, who co-led the study and is an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Physics.

It may not be that hard for state, terroristic, or mischievous actors to commandeer parts of the internet of things, including cars.

“With cars, one of the worrying things is that currently there is effectively one central computing system, and a lot runs through it. You don’t necessarily have separate systems to run your car and run your satellite radio. If you can get into one, you may be able to get into the other,” said Jesse Silverberg of Multiscale Systems, Inc., who co-led the study with Yunker.

Freezing traffic solid

In simulations of hacking internet-connected cars, the researchers froze traffic in Manhattan nearly solid, and it would not even take that to wreak havoc. Here are their results, and the numbers are conservative for reasons mentioned below.

“Randomly stalling 20 percent of cars during rush hour would mean total traffic freeze. At 20 percent, the city has been broken up into small islands, where you may be able to inch around a few blocks, but no one would be able to move across town,” said David Yanni, a graduate research assistant in Junker’s lab.

Not all cars on the road would have to be connected, just enough for hackers to stall 20 percent of all cars on the road. For example, if 40 percent of all cars on the road were connected, hacking half would suffice.

Hacking 10 percent of all cars at rush hour would debilitate traffic enough to prevent emergency vehicles from expediently cutting through traffic that is inching along citywide. The same thing would happen with a 20 percent hack during intermediate daytime traffic.

The researchers’ results appear in the journal Physical Review E on July 20, 2019.

It could take less

For the city to be safe, hacking damage would have to be below that. In other cities, things could be worse.

“Manhattan has a nice grid, and that makes traffic more efficient. Looking at cities without large grids like Atlanta, Boston, or Los Angeles, and we think hackers could do worse harm because a grid makes you more robust with redundancies to get to the same places down many different routes,” Yunker said.

The researchers left out factors that would likely worsen hacking damage, thus a real-world hack may require stalling even fewer cars to shut down Manhattan.

“I want to emphasize that we only considered static situations — if roads are blocked or not blocked. In many cases, blocked roads spill over traffic into other roads, which we also did not include. If we were to factor in these other things, the number of cars you’d have to stall would likely drop down significantly,” Yunker said.

The researchers do have some general ideas of how to reduce the potential damage.

“Split up the digital network influencing the cars to make it impossible to access too many cars through one network,” said lead author Skanka Vivek, a postdoctoral researcher in Yunker’s lab. “If you could also make sure that cars next to each other can’t be hacked at the same time that would decrease the risk of them blocking off traffic together.”

Traffic jams as physics

Yunker researches in soft matter physics, which looks at how constituent parts — in this case, connected cars — act as one whole physical phenomenon. The research team analyzed the movements of cars on streets with varying numbers of lanes, including how they get around stalled vehicles and found they could apply a physics approach to what they observed.

“Whether traffic is halted or not can be explained by classic percolation theory used in many different fields of physics and mathematics,” Yunker said.

Percolation theory is often used in materials science to determine if a desirable quality like a specific rigidity will spread throughout a material to make the final product uniformly stable. In this case, stalled cars spread to make formerly flowing streets rigid and stuck.

The shut-down streets would be only those in which hacked cars have cut off all lanes or in which they have become hindrances that other cars can’t maneuver around and do not include streets where hacked cars still allow traffic flow.

The researchers chose Manhattan for their simulations because a lot of data was available on that city’s traffic patterns

Source: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/07/190729111337.htm

Filed Under: TRAK Blog Tagged With: cibersecurity, cryptocurrency, Hackers, opensource, Security

Poland and the USA declare need for stringent checks of foreign Telecoms

September 12, 2019

As concerns about foreign state influence over critical telecommunications equipment grows, Poland and the USA have signed a declaration calling for stringent checks.

The declaration was signed during a state visit to Poland by US Vice President Mike Pence.

“Protecting these next-generation communications networks from disruption or manipulation and ensuring the privacy and individual liberties of the citizens of the United States, Poland, and other countries is of vital importance,” the agreement states.

While concerns about foreign state influence over national telecom networks have been raised in the past, the debate has grown amid the rollout of 5G due to this generation’s expected use for more critical applications including smart cities, connected cars, and healthcare.

The US has led the concerns for quite some time, but the pressure on its allies to follow has increased amid growing trade tensions with China of which Chinese telecom giant Huawei, in particular, has found itself in the crossfire.

Some observers believe the US’ calls are more political than based in reality, especially given the lack of proven evidence that Huawei itself has ever been involved with any form of espionage. Even the UN said that US fears over Huawei’s equipment are politically-motivated.

However, a series of events haven’t helped Huawei’s case.

A series of unfortunate events?

Huawei CFO, and daughter of the company’s founder, Meng Wanzhou, was arrested in Canada earlier this year over allegations of using a Huawei subsidiary to flout US sanctions against Iran.

A report in the WSJ revealed that a group of Huawei employees were caught intercepting encrypted messages on behalf of the African government to spy on its political opponents. The Huawei employees used software called ‘Pegasus’ to access encrypted messages. However, the report notes that Huawei executives in China weren’t aware of this activity taking place and the company says it’s “never been engaged in ‘hack’ activities”.

Back in 2003, Huawei installed a network in the African Union (AU) headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. A few months after, it was noted the network was most active long after staff had left – between midnight and 3am – and that Chinese trade envoys appeared to be suspiciously informed of the AU negotiators’ positions. A French security company drafted in to examine Huawei’s equipment in the AU HQ found a number of software vulnerabilities had been sending data back to Beijing.

In January, and perhaps the reason Poland decided to join the US in calling for more stringent checks of foreign telecoms equipment, the country’s authorities arrested a Chinese employee of Huawei – a former Polish security official – on spying allegations.

Source: https://www.telecomstechnews.com/news/2019/sep/03/poland-usa-declare-need-stringent-checks-foreign-telecoms-gear/

Filed Under: TRAK Blog Tagged With: 5G, America, China, Connectivity, Europe, Government, Industry, Infrastructure, Mobile, Networks, Security

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