The headlights aren’t on the underside of the vehicle, where they were attaching their device. It was only possible with some mid 90s early 2000s cars where they had computers sophisticated enough to control certain things like acceleration and steering, but not new enough to have thought of hardening against this extremely technical type of attack.
IIRC, it was an episode of the Motherboard series “Phreaked-Out” that showed this off.
What you describe is physically not possible. A vehicle chassis is a ground plane for the entire car, and not hooked into any communications. It’s also a really really noisy ground plane thanks to the alternator and engine.
If they’re plugging into the obd port or some other part of the car giving them access to the canbus, sure. They weren’t only connecting to the chassis though, they need some sort of network access.
You dont need a direct line to the hardware if you’re just forcing bit flips through a large magnetic field. That’s why they hook to the frame; it’s the largest piece of metal.
You’re not hacking a car via fault injection alone though. You can probably crash and reboot the ecu, but there’s no way you’d manage predictable control over which bits you’re flipping.
Also because ground on a car is so dirty, the electronics are well isolated.
If you have any evidence of this actually being possible, I’d love to read it.
The headlights aren’t on the underside of the vehicle, where they were attaching their device. It was only possible with some mid 90s early 2000s cars where they had computers sophisticated enough to control certain things like acceleration and steering, but not new enough to have thought of hardening against this extremely technical type of attack.
IIRC, it was an episode of the Motherboard series “Phreaked-Out” that showed this off.
What you describe is physically not possible. A vehicle chassis is a ground plane for the entire car, and not hooked into any communications. It’s also a really really noisy ground plane thanks to the alternator and engine.
If they’re plugging into the obd port or some other part of the car giving them access to the canbus, sure. They weren’t only connecting to the chassis though, they need some sort of network access.
You dont need a direct line to the hardware if you’re just forcing bit flips through a large magnetic field. That’s why they hook to the frame; it’s the largest piece of metal.
You’re not hacking a car via fault injection alone though. You can probably crash and reboot the ecu, but there’s no way you’d manage predictable control over which bits you’re flipping.
Also because ground on a car is so dirty, the electronics are well isolated.
If you have any evidence of this actually being possible, I’d love to read it.