Karamba Is Writing Software to Keep Your Connected Car from Getting Hacked

With cars becoming more connected and autonomous, cybersecurity is a constant worry for automakers. They dread the likelihood of intrusions into the connected car from hackers, terrorists, extortionists, and thieves (see "Your Future Self-Driving Car Will Be Way More Hackable")--not to mention the random 12-year-old with mischief in mind. Apprehensions about automotive cybersecurity came to a head when a pair of white-hat hackers broke into a Jeep Cherokee in 2015, leading to the recall of 1.4 million vehicles by Chrysler Fiat to fix a software bug in the Uconnect infotainment system (see "Carmakers Accelerate Security Efforts after Hacking Stunts"). Cars represent a fundamentally different sort of security challenge from laptops, servers, or mobile phones, in which corruption or theft of data is the hacker's objective. A cyber-attack on a moving vehicle may create a deadly safety hazard, and conventional antihacking software could be too slow or ineffective to avert an incident.