http://europe.autonews.com/article/20130808/BLOG15/308089989/0/SEARCH#axzz2bkeegp9L
 | Bruce Gain is an Automotive News Europe correspondent in France. |
|
Volkswagen recently won a court case that stopped computer
scientists from publishing an academic paper revealing the secret codes
used to start luxury cars including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and
Lamborghinis.
The victory, however, will make carmakers more
vulnerable to hackers because company engineers will have less
information available to help them design more secure in-car systems.
The
academics wanted to add to a collective pool of knowledge that
engineers could use to make systems more secure from attack. By having
as much information as possible about security flaws, engineers are less
prone to make design errors.
The researchers are "white hats,"
meaning that they create hacks to discover how things work, and
ultimately, how to remove security flaws in computer code.
The
"black hats," those who sell hacks on the black market, and their
customers who use the information to steal and defraud their victims,
are probably happy that Volkswagen won its lawsuit. Now the black hats
can sell their hacking tools for even more money.
When a hack that
can be used to exploit a system is not publicly available black hats
usually must pay for it. If it is in the public domain, it is not worth
as much.
Ross Anderson, a security researcher at the University of
Cambridge's computer laboratory department, thinks that VW's court
victory to stop one security flaw from being published won't stop the
bad guys from doing what they are already doing.
In the end, the court case is bad public relations for VW, Anderson wrote in an e-mail reply to questions.
"Now
the world and his dog know not just that their engineering skills are
less than perfect, but that the company is unpleasant and unreasonable
to boot," Anderson wrote. "If they had kept quiet, then [the research
paper VW stopped from being published] would have been one out of
several dozen ... and would probably have got only a few column inches
in obscure specialist publications."
Instead, the case was reported by the Guardian newspaper, the BBC, and other media outlets including
Automotive News Europe (for the original story, click here).
You can reach Bruce Gain at bgain@crain.com.
