Was daydreaming the other day about how this could be used by adversaries to hack even air-gapped computers. Any peripheral which contains a microchip and some ram is a vector. Does the compartmentalized facility ever bring in a new monitor, or mouse, or keyboard? All of those things could be hacked to hack their new host. And then taking data into/out of the facility. Which devices have lights? Any LED that can be blinked is a low-speed output channel. Which have light-level sensors, or sound sensors? Or any RF capability? If bluetooth is disabled by software but the hardware is still there...
If I was writing a novel, the top secret facility would be cracked open by the smoke alarm, which has a wired connection to the central fire control and runs a little microprocessor. There is enough storage for 20 programmable voice alert messages. I/O includes an LED and also a light sensor. After the attacker gains control of the smoke alarms -- reach to every room of the secure facility -- their focus turns to mass poisoning peripherals until one makes it into range. A poisoned monitor detects the smoke alarm blinking a coded broadcast via its LED during darkened overnight hours. The monitor responds with flashing code of its own. That creates a communication path back to the controlling LLM. From there its like attacking a normal networked device, just with a slow data link in the middle...
In environments where the threat model requires it you can/must already buy hardware variants that are non-radio. It's not just disabled in software but is a different physical SKU. Likewise data diodes for USB, audio, or display connections are also common.
The novelty is the uniform adaption of USB-C for the rest of the world and the endless attack surface that provides.
There are a lot of cars out there where the head unit has connection to the CAN bus. Which means this malware vector could be used to directly cause crashes. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19751872
The car hacker's handbook [1] has a chapter on just using the infotainment system to access the CAN. Specifically mentions "attacking through the update system".
An aftermarket head unit connects to the CAN bus? The aftermarket head unit I installed certainly doesn't. Are you sure what you are saying, which is true for OEM units, applies to aftermarket ones?
Can't vouch for all car architectures, but in most cases the head unit is QM and safety domains are usually segmented from each other. So even if the head unit talks CAN (it needs to get car data somehow) it will only communicate with the rest of the car through a gateway that will not allow it to take any dangerous actions.
That's true for most cars, but some, particularly the older cars, they weren't as concerned about security as they should have been. And so sometimes the radio can talk to things that it probably shouldn't be able to talk to.
I did not connect ODB2. The HU I got puts itself as a passthrough to the stock BMW HU (which you still need to be able to use, you switch the screen to its output by holding down a button), and that connector includes CAN.
There are numerous reasons the HU needs CAN, for example to get the steering wheel angle to be able to draw the guides over the backup camera feed. Or to switch to the backup camera feed when you put the car in reverse.
It is really exposing the CAN bus, it is not some adjacent subsystem overlaying the steering guides and rearview video by interrupting the video signal? It's actually entirely coming from the aftermarket HU? That's fascinating! I wouldn't expect an aftermarket system to be too good at that functionality, guides tend to be carefully tuned for specific car/steering/camera combos.
Ideally most cars should be relying heavily on data diodes to minimize the risk of a bad actor wreaking havoc. I know for sure some cars (there was a Jeep example as I recall) don't do that, but I kinda wonder which ones do. It seems like a pretty obvious attack vector worth protecting.
Yes, the BMW NBT quadlock connector has K-CAN2 (so only body bus, no engine/chassis which is on a different CAN bus). (in true German over-engineering fashion it also has fiber for audio and Ethernet for diagnostics)
I brought up the backup camera as another reason the head unit has CAN, since in my car that's what's handling drawing the backup guide lines.
The aftermarket HU would have enough data to do so, but in my case it doesn't (although it does read CAN for buttons/iDrive). The original HU is still there and functioning, but the aftermarket Android is between the vehicle harness and the original HU with some passthrough and swapping of video cables.
I can hold down the Menu button on my iDrive and the Android HU switches the screen to show the original HU output and I can interact with it normally. And when I put the car into reverse it also switches so I can see the original backup camera feed, then switches back to Android after I drive forward again.
Of course I use none of the Android functionality at all, the whole ridiculous system is solely for CarPlay.
As the other comment points out, if you've installed more than a few, you've definitly connected to the CAN bus.
Few headunits will ask you to connect to the OBD2 port for practical reasons, but the miscilanous manufacturer specific connectors you hook up often include CAN bus connections.
OBD2 port is just 1 of multiple ports with access to the network, even your headlights can be on the bus
The expensive ones do so you get more of an OEM infotainment experience. I guess you could potentially cause a crash over the CAN bus but there's a very small overlap between cars that allow you to swap out headunits and cars that can be controlled enough over CAN to cause a crash. Other than commercial vehicles, I don't think there are any new cars that have DIN stereos anymore.
Many do - the one I was looking at for my vehicle in particular uses it to restore the steering wheel controls (which are broadcast over the CAN-B low speed bus)
So on an affected system, ring 0 root has access to pretty much everything that was hidden in negative ring territory. The page is pretty quiet about what other processor families might be similar beyond this specific AMD16h (an older AMD low-power family)?
from the GH page:
> Developed and tested on AMD Family 16h CPUs, the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked. 17h and beyond simply leave this information out.
As long as you know the controller's translation registers, it's applicable? Not tested on later one's merely because the information wasn't readily available it seems.
> Developed and tested on AMD Family 16h CPUs, the last generation whose datasheets document the DRAM controller's translation registers — and show that they can't be locked. 17h and beyond simply leave this information out.
I suppose it will fall to AI as well to compose the mathematical equivalent of The Ballad of John Henry. Who will be the human champion, the last great hero who can deliver proofs "from the book" that a machine cannot outperform?
This is an unhealthy view of mathematics. It's mathematics as envisioned by football fans.
The most valuable things in mathematics are not beautiful proofs. We need more useful definitions. Actually coming up with useful definitions (and building good conjectures out of them - not even theorems, conjectures) is something LLMs have not yet tried to conquer.
It's probably not quite that dramatic yet, though it seems possible it will get there, maybe even soon.
There's no structural reason to expect acceleration any more or less than an asymptotic behavior (if even that, acceleration is probably the bigger ask). Different problems yield to a new solvent, maybe that's also more, but it could go either way and we definitionally don't know yet because we don't understand the convexity of AI capability, we cannot directly access it interiority, we don't know if it's sandbagging (other than that it does sometimes, it can). It's an emergent phenomemon that might actively resist measurement. Or it might be as predictable as a clock in a few years.
No one knows, or if they do, they aren't talking. The loud people don't know anything.
> a film, Infinite Jest, also called "the Entertainment" or "the samizdat". The film is so compelling that its viewers lose all interest in anything other than repeatedly viewing it, and thus eventually die.
I think you are right on the big picture : what has changed is Big Tech has recognized that comprehensive data on individuals is valuable. I think the biggest value category however is in the area of highly-targeted opinion manipulation. Build a model of what are the current beliefs of each individual, get paid by marketing or political candidates or whoever to generate an optimized media feed to manipulate that person's beliefs to match some target set of beliefs.
If I was writing a novel, the top secret facility would be cracked open by the smoke alarm, which has a wired connection to the central fire control and runs a little microprocessor. There is enough storage for 20 programmable voice alert messages. I/O includes an LED and also a light sensor. After the attacker gains control of the smoke alarms -- reach to every room of the secure facility -- their focus turns to mass poisoning peripherals until one makes it into range. A poisoned monitor detects the smoke alarm blinking a coded broadcast via its LED during darkened overnight hours. The monitor responds with flashing code of its own. That creates a communication path back to the controlling LLM. From there its like attacking a normal networked device, just with a slow data link in the middle...