While over-the-air updates are becoming a thing, it’s not going to be financially attractive for auto makers to continue providing security updates for 15 year old cars.
I don’t know what the solution it, but it’s going to be challenging.
Part of the solution may be the GSA, Government Services Administration. When I was still working in tech, we had to guarantee 5 years of spare parts or replacements for all government contracts. GSA could start requiring software updates for up to 15 years. This would then become the norm and trickle out to consumers.
Sounds good in theory. But the switchover to electric is almost certainly going to have casualties. Not every company will survive, which means a lot of cars will have no support structure.
Maybe have car companies put the source code in escrow and have it released to public domain if the company goes belly up?
Having the software in my car maintained as OS isn’t a great feeling. But it beats not having it maintained at all.
I mean, based on the requirements, we’re going to end up with essentially little embedded servers in all ours cars, running some sort of tweaked version of Linux with “drivers” for various parts of the car’s systems. Probably tapping into the same things that the OBD port uses.
Hopefully, it’ll be something like a Raspberry Pi that can be both easily upgraded and hopefully replaced during warranty service when the inevitable vulnerabilities are discovered.
While over-the-air updates are becoming a thing, it’s not going to be financially attractive for auto makers to continue providing security updates for 15 year old cars.
I don’t know what the solution it, but it’s going to be challenging.
Part of the solution may be the GSA, Government Services Administration. When I was still working in tech, we had to guarantee 5 years of spare parts or replacements for all government contracts. GSA could start requiring software updates for up to 15 years. This would then become the norm and trickle out to consumers.
Sounds good in theory. But the switchover to electric is almost certainly going to have casualties. Not every company will survive, which means a lot of cars will have no support structure.
Maybe have car companies put the source code in escrow and have it released to public domain if the company goes belly up?
Having the software in my car maintained as OS isn’t a great feeling. But it beats not having it maintained at all.
I mean, based on the requirements, we’re going to end up with essentially little embedded servers in all ours cars, running some sort of tweaked version of Linux with “drivers” for various parts of the car’s systems. Probably tapping into the same things that the OBD port uses.
Hopefully, it’ll be something like a Raspberry Pi that can be both easily upgraded and hopefully replaced during warranty service when the inevitable vulnerabilities are discovered.