Wouldn't that be enough reason to take your business elsewhere?

The result? They will not sell any. There is enough old cars around to sustain the transportation needs of the population for quite a while (certainly until someone decides to make new cars without all this crap).

If they are only willing to lease the car to me, I will happily take my money elsewhere.

A lot of it seems to do with wanting to be able to replace certs and have reasonable expiration times, but not really understanding how to do that (I don't mean it's not possible, i mean the manufacturers seem to not really understand how to do it effectively)

As an example, the siemens CNC controller on my metal mill is totally signed. It has an FPGA with a secure element producing verification signatures to double check cert sigs haven't been modified, Every single file system with binaries is a read-only signed cramfs file signed with a secp521 ecc key. All read-write fsen are mounted noexec, nosuid, etc etc etc.

The initial CA key is baked into secure hardware.

However, in the end, they only verify the CA and signing certs have the right names and properties (various oem specific fields, etc), because the certs have 3-5 year expiration dates and these things are not connected to the internet or even updated often. So they accept expired certs for the signatures, and they also accept any root cert + signing cert that looks the same as the current ones.

So you can replace the CA key and signing keys with something that looks exactly the same as their current one and resign everything, and it works fine.

A whole lot of effort that can be defeated pretty quickly.

I would be surprised if the cars were not similar - they look really secure, but in the end they made tradeoffs that defeat the system.

The last place I worked on a system that billed $5-$10 million a month, all pure profit. I was the only one with any knowledge.

When the server was built the guy who did so never documented the root password, and nobody knows it. I was in the sudoers file, and I have no idea what they do since I left. I tried to explain it to multiple levels of management, but I lost them all the second I opened a terminal and ssh’d in.

I can tell it’s still running…

If I was American Lease, I would look into that, besides suing.

Edit: Looking into it, it’s Android Automotive without Google Services. Who wants to bet that it’s an old version of Android on a recycled MediaTek tablet processor which is no longer getting security patches? Knowing MediaTek, completely reprogramming Secure Boot might not be off the table.

I believe they are suggesting that it is illustrative to the general public as to why buying cars with heavy cloud integration is a bad idea.

^ Edit: Honestly I don't have any experience with this, but I assume you still need access to Google for notifications etc., so maybe not

Company of a friend of a friend had an intractable problem with an impossible deadline, like, literally, less than a day.

Don’t remember the details, but I fixed it. Deadline next morning, problem solved, saved the day.

It’s midnight, on a status call, wife is sleeping in the next room. The IT guy, his Russian contractor, and “Management” (folks who called me in) are on the call.

The IT guy is SCREAMING at me because I hadn’t checked the code into his convoluted VCS. That thing was a mess. I told them early on that doing that kind of bookkeeping was not a priority. We could deal with it after the crisis had passed.

He was having none of it. At high volume. In the middle of the night.

I simply told them “You know, I don’t have to be here.”

This ][ close to just saying “ok” and hanging up the phone.

Good times.

There were scenarios down the track requiring porting the customer base into another data model that a competent design team would have in the brief, given a competent leadership.

oh wait...

Owners tinkering with ICE vehicles was and is a thing and I don't see how an electric power train makes that too much different.

Open standards and data formats would be a good middle ground to help avoid the type of problem with Fisker "unable" to migrate to a different provider. Although I wish that vehicles did not have to phone home to the mother ship at all.