Are you in control or being controlled in your vehicle?

Vehicles changed from being just mechanical devices which will just obey the commands to a smarter Sensor-ECU-Actuator systems which sense the surroundings and take necessary smart actions. A modern car has around forty to hundred different ECU’s, possibly communicating, to make intelligent decisions. But recently, there is a lot of buzz in the research community on hacking and taking control of vehicles. These literature describe and document the different ways to take control of vehicles. In this talk, we will first discuss what makes this kind of hacking possible? Then we will continue with different logical ways to do this and discuss some proposed mechanisms to protect it. We then propose a context aware mechanism which can detect these unsafe behaviors in the vehicle and describe the challenges associated with them.