Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Posted Nov 16, 2021 15:45 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs by anselm
Parent article: Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

I seem to remember a pretty major bug where said black box failed to record stuff. Something like the box correctly recorded the fact the accelerator was not being pressed while the car careered at full throttle down the road, or there was a confusion between the brake and accelerator (and yes I know drivers panic and hit the wrong one) but the evidence did show that whatever the fault was with the car, it was the computer manipulating the controls with no input from the driver, and no output to the black box ...

Until modern "fault free" software engineering is applied (by law) to car black boxes, I don't think we'll be able to trust them.

Cheers,
Wol

Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Posted Nov 16, 2021 17:36 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (1 responses)

What I recall about the "unintended acceleration" mess was that there were two unrelated problems in play:

(1) The operator was indeed pressing the accelerator pedal (or at least not depressing the brake pedal)
(2) The pedal itself was physically impeded from returning to neutral (eg getting stuck under a floor mat, or wear on the pedal's pivot)

Most of the reports were proven to be (1), some turned out to be (2), resuting in recalls/changes to make the floor mat retainers more robust and inspections (and replacement if necessary) of the pedal assembly. As far as I am aware there were no instances that were ultimately demonstrated to be a failure of the pedal sensors (yes, plural) or the ECU/software.

Relatedly, I'm not aware of any black box "failures" (as opposed to physical destruction or simply not being designed to track the data that investigator were wanting after the fact -- eg they recorded the state of the brake pedal but not the state of the accelerator) but I'll freely admit my memory is hazy.

Exposing Trojan Source exploits in Emacs

Posted Nov 16, 2021 18:58 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I believe there was at least one "fly by wire" case where the brake was shown to be pressed to the floor ...

It was tracked down to a glitch in the software.

Cheers,
Wol