[Bloat] LWN article discussing the FCC blunder, as well a VW's (The Internet of criminal things)

[David Collier-Brown]

That's supposed to be a free link!  I tried it with an incognito browser 
and saw "The following subscription-only content has been made available 
to you by an LWN subscriber..."

Full text below (:-()

--dave


On 24/09/15 02:30 PM, Rich Brown wrote:
> Would you provide a link to the FCC article (for those of us who don't 
> have a LWN subscription)? Thanks.
>
>> On Sep 24, 2015, at 7:44 AM, David Collier-Brown <davec-b at rogers.com 
>> <mailto:davec-b at rogers.com>> wrote:
>>
>>   * http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/658198/233be09044fdb1e5/
>>     -- 
>>     David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
>>     System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
>>     davecb at spamcop.net            |                      -- Mark Twain
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bloat mailing list
>> Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net <mailto:Bloat at lists.bufferbloat.net>
>> https://lists.bufferbloat.net/listinfo/bloat
>

  The Internet of criminal things


    [LWN subscriber-only content]



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By Jonathan Corbet
September 23, 2015 We live in an increasingly software-defined world, a 
trend which has both good and bad aspects. The recent revelation [PDF] 
that Volkswagen has been selling cars that have been explicitly built to 
defeat emissions tests highlights one of the bad ones: software control 
makes the incorporation (and hiding) of antifeatures easy. We are, 
unfortunately, going to see many other incidents like this one, even 
though we have long had a vision of what at least a partial solution to 
this problem would look like.

Cars, at this point, can be thought of as a rolling network of computers 
with some interesting peripheral devices, some of which may involve 
internal combustion technology. The details of an engine's operation 
have been under software control for a long time, and replacement ROMs 
changing a car's performance characteristics have been commonplace for 
nearly as long. Modern "trusted execution" technology makes the creation 
of such ROMs more difficult, but that turns out not to be an obstacle if 
the company wanting to subvert an engine's control software is the 
manufacturer itself.

Volkswagen's hack must have been easily done: one could, for example, 
have the engine-control software apply a different set of parameters 
when a connection to the on-board diagnostic port is detected. No need 
for the attachment of a separate "defeat device" (as the press seems to 
like to call it) and no need for an elaborate company-wide conspiracy. A 
single commit by a single engineer at the behest of a single manager 
would suffice. In retrospect, the surprising part of this story is not 
that somebody at Volkswagen gave in to the temptation to engage in a bit 
of benchmark cheating; the surprise is that far more incidents of this 
nature have not yet come to light.

The consequences of this cheating are severe. Emissions testing is a key 
part of a strategy that has significantly improved air quality in 
American cities over the last several decades. Subverting that testing 
means more poison in the air, more health problems, and more 
environmental degradation. It is a criminal act on a massive scale. The 
consequences for Volkswagen are likely to be severe — but probably not 
severe enough.

As many others have pointed out, VW was certainly helped by the ease 
with which antifeatures can be hidden in software shipped to others. 
When we get into a car, we trust our lives and health to a large body of 
proprietary control software; the source is unavailable, so we cannot 
inspect it for bugs, vulnerabilities, or explicit evil. Legal regimes in 
much of the world make a crime out of reverse-engineering this software, 
so we cannot try to figure out how it operates even without the source. 
Digital rights management (DRM) mechanisms built into the hardware make 
that reverse engineering even harder; this DRM may even be mandated by 
government agencies fearful of individuals modifying their own 
engine-control software.

Those in favor of such DRM requirements should bear in mind that, by 
some counts, VW has shipped over 11 million cars with corrupt 
engine-control software in it. DRM has, in the end, enabled the crime it 
was meant to prevent, and on a far wider scale that would have otherwise 
been possible.

Cars are not the only vehicle (so to speak) for software that can hide 
user-hostile antifeatures. In the US, the Federal Communications 
Commission is currently pondering changes that would make it far harder 
to put free software onto WiFi devices. One need not even consider the 
damage such rules may do to free-software development, which has been 
the primary source of innovation and improvement in this area, to see 
where such rules could lead. We cannot expect corporations, many of 
which show levels of restraint inferior to that of a typical toddler, to 
resist the temptation to put spyware or malware into their widely 
distributed devices sitting in privileged positions on thousands of 
networks. We cannot really even trust them to adhere to the spectrum 
rules that are the motivation for the proposed restrictions; VW's lack 
of respect for emissions rules has made that clear.

Similar problems exist with voting machines, Internet-connected 
appliances, phone handsets, fitness monitors, set-top boxes, and more. 
Each of these devices is, at a minimum, in a position to spy on us. 
Keeping governmental fingers out of these devices is a challenge in its 
own right, but companies will often find a strong incentive to play 
games of their own. Companies that are struggling, or even those that 
fear a downturn in the next quarter's numbers, will often give in to 
that incentive; when all it takes is an easily hidden patch, why not?

This will not be the first time that somebody points out that it is hard 
to see a solution that doesn't involve making those patches harder to 
hide. That, of course, means moving toward something that looks a lot 
like free software. If VW's engine-control software were open (with 
reproducible builds so that the software running in a specific car could 
be verified), it would have been far harder for the company to get away 
with violating the rules for as long as it did. Source availability is 
far from a guarantee that the code will be reviewed or that any 
reviewers will actually find deliberately introduced antifeatures, but 
it improves the odds considerably. Many a company might find the 
backbone to resist temptation if it knew that its code would be reviewed 
by sharp-eyed outsiders. Said companies might just find the wherewithal 
to clean up the code and fix some of their bugs as well.
A free-software mandate for safety-critical (and privacy-critical) 
software seems unlikely to happen anytime soon, alas. Decriminalizing 
research into how these systems operate might be a more achievable goal, 
but there are challenges there too; the Electronic Frontier Foundation 
has run into significant opposition in its efforts to get a ruling that 
investigating automotive software is not a violation of the 
anti-circumvention provisions of the US Digital Millennium Copyright 
Act, for example. Hidden, proprietary software gives a lot of power to 
those who control it; they will not give it up willingly. As a result, 
we can, unfortunately, expect to continue to be subjected to 
surveillance and criminal behavior from the devices that we think we 
own. We can't say we weren't warned.


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-- 
David Collier-Brown,         | Always do right. This will gratify
System Programmer and Author | some people and astonish the rest
davecb at spamcop.net           |                      -- Mark Twain

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