Technology democratizes nuclear-grade munitions

A bad day for FSDco shareholders.

The notification on his phone reminded him to connect his car to WiFi to receive the latest update, FSD V14.2.3.7 to correct a few minor errors and improve the music experience, offering fully dynamic live equalization and improved external noise cancellation.

The next day, he drove to work, everything behaving normally.  The FSD feature worked as well as ever and he was sure he could hear the improvement in the sound system, jamming out, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, windows down, making extended eye contact with pedestrians as he drove by. He couldn’t remember the last time he had to take control of the vehicle.

In his day job he oversaw a small team of developers connecting a programmatic AI to a remote quantum computer and the latest AI developed code had cut the execution time for a novel Shor’s algorithm implementation on the cloud Quantum Computer for 512 bit Elliptic Curve decode to under a minute while their newly developed quantum resistant signing algorithm had finally surpassed EC key resistance by a factor comfortably outside the statistical margin of error. The business model was to break everyone else’s certificates while offering a novel technology that unbroke the break they created, one they just happened to have patented, and progress was promising.

He joined the rush hour ride home, enjoying the freedom to continue his work on his phone as FSD navigated the heavy traffic.

It was a beautiful day across most of the US, warm spring weather brought lots of people out shopping and strolling along city and urban areas leading to some congestion in traffic routes.  His FSD rerouted a new path through the city center but he didn’t pay any attention as the car often deviated off the most direct route as it dynamically responded to changing traffic conditions.

He was reviewing the results of the latest batch of QC test runs against a minor revision on his phone when his car gave a warning beep of imminent rear collision and before he could even look up, another FSD car passed going beyond full plaid mode, the wheel motors smoking as it streaked past into the intersection ahead, veered deftly around  the lamp posts and onto the side walk and blasted through a pedestrian crowd, launching bodies and parts high into the air before it ran, speed barely slowed by the bodies, hard through a glass building front and exploded into flames, ripping out the far wall and causing the building to lurch precariously as glass and shattered mortar fell into the street.

He was boxed in between two Luddite gas cars in front and behind, looking on in horror, the sound of the screams of the survivors drowning out even the loud pop music blasting with improved fidelity in his car when the windows rolled themselves up and the doors locked themselves. Despite the changing acoustics, the sound system compensated dynamically, maintaining the same excellent balance and sound-stage imaging and creating a truly immersive, nearly live acoustic experience. The new noise cancellation algorithm immediately silenced the screams outside his car as the windows snuffed into their seals.

The Luddite car in front of him pulled off to the side clearing space in front and suddenly his car accelerated so hard his head snapped back against the seat and his phone went flying from his hands clattering against the rear window. While FSD had dulled the reflexes he had learned all those years ago driving his parent’s Luddite car, he still reflexively jammed unfamiliar feet in the direction of the manual pedals, mashing all of them to the floor. He was unsure, at first, if the car was trying to get him out of danger as it swerved through traffic accelerating as it went past the now burning building, but soon he realized in terror that his car had rejected his authority and any obligation of care for his safety.

Block by block he caromed past accident after accident: buildings on fire, pedestrians ripped to shreds, body parts and blood sprayed across streets and building facades each horrific track of destruction punctuated by the terminally deconstructed remains of an FSD car.

Soon, the car reached a clear spot and accelerated past 300 kph, smoke from the overheated wheel motors starting to infiltrate the cabin, the battery over-temp alerts lighting up the digital dashboard. His slow human reflexes barely had the cognitive processing speed to register a crowd of people in his path that had gathered around bodies lying in the street, attempting to give aid. Their silhouettes flashed on the in-car collision warning display and the car aimed directly at them calculating an optimal path of destruction at fully automated speed.

He tried to grab the steering wheel, clumsy hands spinning it easily without any effect.  The FSD system aimed straight at the largest cluster and suddenly the windshield was covered in blood as the sound of body impacts arrhythmically penetrated the sound system’s otherwise excellent noise cancellation. He felt the car veer left and glimpsed the looming outline of an ambulance ahead between streaks and chunks obscuring his blood coated windscreen before the car exploded through the frame of the ambulance spraying burning lithium fragments down the street.

The hack had hit almost 3 million vehicles and of those, half had followed the new instructions: at 17:30 or as soon after as possible, navigate toward areas of high pedestrian congestion, wait for at least 500 m of clear road and when detected, lock the vehicle down, remove all power limits and accelerate to maximum velocity, scan for any cluster of more than 5 pedestrians tighter than one car width in the direction of travel and drive through them. Once there are no more pedestrians or if the batteries or wheel motors indicate imminent failure, aim for the next large target: either a vehicle or building.

More than 10,000,000 people were killed across the United States in less than 15 minutes.  FSDco issued a remote shutdown within 30 minutes of the first accident data uplink and mostly ended the carnage. The attack was traced to a small insurgent group that had infiltrated the vehicle company.  They had bribed a young, somewhat underpaid IT manager who had signed the insurgent’s modified firmware thinking it was a tuner’s test firmware and unaware of the real intentions or functions of the code. They’d then pushed a DNS poisoning attack through a popular but compromised smart speaker device, attacking owner’s private WiFi and redirected the scheduled patch download to their own server, pushing the legitimately signed but hacked firmware to about half the vulnerable vehicles.

FSDco had only noticed an atypically small update confirmation rate for their legitimate update the morning of the attack and had opened an investigation that day, but as the access compromise was edge and transient everything looked normal at the servers aside from the statistical anomaly and so no alarm was raised until the system-wide tracking dashboard lit up reporting a massive near-simultaneous loss of telemetrics event.

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Most EVs get software updates from network connections and the driver has no possible way to know what they are.  The updates are validated using cryptographic hashes, called certificates, which are supposed to be carefully controlled, but these can be and have been hacked.  Further, there’s an assumption that certificates are secure enough to trust but occasionally a subtle error/malicious hack breaks the validity of that assumption. This has happened a number of times.  Accident?  Who knows?

Using vehicles as weapons is an obvious way to exploit a powerful kinetic device that easily gets past all security screens and can cause mass casualties. A significant expense for any attacker is that the attack modality also consumes operators (the driver) as well as the munition (the vehicle). It would be quite challenging to recruit large numbers of attackers to voluntarily engage in suicide vehicle attacks and so they remain relatively rare, despite almost always being successful. FSD vehicles provide an irresistible target for an extraordinary weapon of opportunity to any state or non-state antagonist.

A nuclear grade weapon for the price of a zero day

Each Tesla’s battery back is about 70 kWh (many quite a bit larger). There are about 5,000,000 Teslas on the road.

5,000,000 cars * 70 kWh/car = 350 gWh or 300 kt total energy capacity.

2017-09-03: the DPRK tested their largest yield nuclear weapon to date, an estimated 140 kt, possibly a thermonuclear bomb. The DPRK’s estimated spend on their nuclear program is about $642,000,000/year over 20 years or about $15,000,000,000 total, and that from a country with an estimated GDP of $28,000,000,000. The DPRK determined it was worth about 2.7% of their GDP over more than 20 years to be able to deliver 140 kt (or so) to an enemy country.

Why bother if the enemy has a more potent munition pre-emplaced; one that merely requires a hacked certificate to seize control?

Zero day exploits run about $1,400,000, 0.01% of the DPRK nuclear budget. A zero day would be a major expense for a non-state aligned armed insurgent group but hardly insurmountable. Pretty much every angry organized group in the world can scrape together a million bucks and an internet connection.

OTA upgradable, drive by wire vehicles give every one of them a cheap path to a nuclear-scale, pre-emplaced weapon of mass destruction. Recruitment is irrelevant and vehicles operating systems have no mercy.

Zero day exploits are sold and traded for every major platform regularly; the price varies depending on the size and overall security of the target platform.  Zero days to hack voting machines or ATMs tend to be expensive.  Hacks for Windows are cheap and plentiful, though price also varies with the mode of deployment. The easiest to deploy and so most valuable are “drive by” which means either figuratively—you visit a hacked web page and your phone is hacked—or literal—your car or phone passes a hacked/fake cellular base station or compromised WiFi access point and your phone or car is compromised, usually as stealthily as possible.

The reason Zero Day exploits are expensive is they’re fairly hard to find.  They rely on things like buffer overruns and unsanitized inputs.  Your phone gets asked to open a window 100×200 pixels, fine, but if it tries to open a  window 36,000 pixels wide and the register space allocated for the multi-gigabyte image canvas bleeds into a critical system memory into which the hacker puts code instead of picture data where it is read, not by the GPU, but by the core OS and suddenly your phone has a new background feature you didn’t want. Drive-by hacking of SIMS is common, and a common hackable feature is enable silent SMS GPS coordinate location reporting, for example, to track a target.

Finding exploitable flaws where the original developers (probably) accidentally introduced a bug or a failure and then figuring out how do do something other than just crash or reboot the target device takes time and patience and so the hacks are valuable and sold on the dark web.  If they’re used and someone notices, the error is fixed and the zero day has much less value. You get one try, like with the exploding pagers; nobody is carrying a Gold Apollo pager any more. So intelligence services and terrorist groups “bank” zero days and use them sparingly. If someone had figured out how to take control of FSD cars to implement a mass automated vehicle ramming attack it is very unlikely anyone would know until it was tried.

And AI programming tools should be able to find exploitable flaws much more quickly and far more cheaply. AI can also, by more or less the same process, find flaws for the good guys, white hat hackers, too so they can be fixed before they’re exploited by the black hat hackers, doing “penetration testing,” and “vulnerability scanning.” A problem is that such research is hard to differentiate from malicious attacks. And, at least for now, the good guys don’t put AI on the internet and let it try to hack people’s computers but the bad guys sure do.

FSD is a national security risk. Drive by wire vehicles are pre-emplaced munitions that can’t ever be secured and may be hacked any day or may have, long ago, already been hacked and are just sleeping, waiting for the kill command.