It is an interesting question. A while a go, 2 guys made a presentation at DEFCON with a presentation about their findings on hacking a Tesla Model S.
They were able to successfully get root access to the car's system (not chroot, real full root access) and with that they were able to fully access to the car's API within Tesla OS. They even showed a video about one of the guys driving the car at low speed and the other one remotely accessing to the car's Linux shell by SSH and shutting down the whole car while the first guy was riding.
The interesting thing is that for higher speeds, for example more than 50 km/h, the car seems to override any of the Linux systems and the root access becomes useless, it stops working.
In another words, the car is able to decouple itself from the Tesla OS.
While it is very reassuring that the car is able, the speedpoint chosen by Tesla – 50kmph — is not. I'd rather a car not be remote-controllable at anything more than a slow crawl, and 50kmph is quite capable of making such a heavy car dangerous.
I'm not sure what are the exact conditions for the Tesla OS to be overridden by other internal systems, 50 km/h was just a placeholder value for "lower speeds".
It should. In a world where people routinely talk/text/drink and drive I don't think we should expect 100% from electric or self-driving cars.
I cringe from the PR implications as I say this but really I fully supported Jeb! when he shrugged about one of the shootings. If we want freedom, we will have some missteps. I kind of wish we could say the same about religious extremists but that ship was always under command of the same bigots who controlled the conversation during the red scare.
Preemptive multitasking means that infinite loops in userland software do not lock the CPU. Everything that anyone would cal an app is run on a system that does preemptive multitasking, so it is not a problem. Presumably, the dashboard console computer is separate from the many other computers in the car for reliability purposes. If it is not, Telsa Motors would have really messed up.
I have never driven while running any of my stuff. Also, this is the CID, it doesn't control those things. You can even reboot the CID while you're driving.
The safety-critical stuff is not running on that computer. So the brakes still work, and the airbags deploy, for sure. I'd be very surprised if the autopilot is on there.
Again, this entertainment system that she hacked is completely separate from the driving system. You can literally reboot it while you are driving down the road. The screen goes black during reboot, the radio goes off, then it comes back in 10 seconds or so. I think maybe in the 4 years I've owned it once or twice it rebooted itself.
I'd hope so, since apparently the computer that's being hacked here occasionally crashes and restarts in normal operation with the official unmodified Tesla firmware.
They were able to successfully get root access to the car's system (not chroot, real full root access) and with that they were able to fully access to the car's API within Tesla OS. They even showed a video about one of the guys driving the car at low speed and the other one remotely accessing to the car's Linux shell by SSH and shutting down the whole car while the first guy was riding.
The interesting thing is that for higher speeds, for example more than 50 km/h, the car seems to override any of the Linux systems and the root access becomes useless, it stops working.
In another words, the car is able to decouple itself from the Tesla OS.
You can check the presentation from those guys here: https://youtu.be/KX_0c9R4Fng?t=39m51s