Sticking accelerator pedals were just the beginning. Soon you might lose control of your car not because of a technical failure, but because someone hacked into it from afar.

Tomorrow at a security conference in California, Stefan Savage and his team will present their research showing how they used the computer systems that oversee different systems in a car to break in and take control—braking and accelerating against the driver’s will.

The researchers concentrated their attacks on the electronic control units (ECUs) scattered throughout modern vehicles which oversee the workings of many car components. It is thought that modern vehicles have about 100 megabytes of binary code spread across up to 70 ECUs [BBC News].

The software Savage’s team created, called CarShark, took advantage of the fact that ECUs must communicate between different systems. Electronic Stability Control, for instance, must talk to the brakes, accelerators, and wheels; Active Cruise Control and systems that parallel park the car for you also rely on communication across many systems. The team inserted fake packets of data into the lines of communication to seize control of a car, Savage says.

He and co-researcher Tadayoshi Kohno of the University of Washington, describe the real-world risk of any of the attacks they’ve worked out as extremely low. An attacker would have to have sophisticated programming abilities and also be able to physically mount some sort of computer on the victim’s car to gain access to the embedded systems. But as they look at all of the wireless and Internet-enabled systems the auto industry is dreaming up for tomorrow’s cars, they see some serious areas for concern [BusinessWeek].

Savage said he and his team wanted to get a head start on the problem of car-hacking, which is sure to arise when hackers get the chance, especially with more wireless access. In small ways it has already started: A couple of months ago an Austin, Texas, man who was fired by a car dealership broke into the remote system that the dealer used to torment people who were delinquent on their payments by honking the horn or otherwise annoying them. About 100 people found their cars inoperable, or honking like mad, after his hack.

The researchers said they did not address the question of the defenses the cars might have against remote access, but said the experience of the PC industry, which did not have extensive security problems until computers became networked, was worth remembering. “To be fair, you should expect that various entry points in the automotive environment are no more secure in the automotive environment than they are in your PC,” Mr. Savage said [The New York Times].

Car companies should probably address this issue before they offer us the networked “road trains” of the future.

Related Content:
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80beats: Massive Spanish Botnet Busted, But Hacker Mastermind Remains Unknown
80beats: Code Protecting 80 Percent of Cellphone Convos Finally Cracked
80beats: In the Commute of the Future, Drivers Can Let a Pro Take the Wheel

Image: Savage et. al.

It’s the essence of instinct: If you take a lab mouse who has never caught a glimpse of a cat and waft a little eau de feline towards it, the mouse will freeze in fear, and will then back away from the source of the odor. Now researchers have pinned down the chemical signals the mice are reacting to–and have shown in the process a fascinating new form of inter-species communication.

Mice have a specialized organ in their noses that picks up chemical signals, called the vomeronasal organ, which helps them detect pheromones emitted by other mice. These mice pheromones have a direct effect on behavior–most obviously in the realms of mating and fighting. In this new study, published in the journal Cell, neurobiologist Lisa Stowers decided to investigate whether the vomeronasal organ was capable of picking up signals from other species as well.

The reseachers took normal lab mice and mutant mice with inactive vomeronasal organs and presented them with cotton balls laced with predator smells, including cat saliva and rat urine. The normal mice backed into the corners of their cages as if trying to escape a predator’s attention, but the mutant mice showed no signs of concern. The mutants were so relaxed that they didn’t even react when a live but anesthetized rat was placed in their cages.

“In fact, one of our subjects curled up and went to sleep next to the rat,” Dr. Stowers said. “We think he was cold” [The New York Times].

The researchers then identified the precise chemicals that were triggering the fear reaction in mice by dripping one chemical compound at a time on to a cotton ball, and found that compounds called Mups, or major urinary proteins, were the active ingredient. Despite their name, Mups aren’t only present in urine, but also in saliva and other secretions.

Experts say this work is a major step forward for understanding the biology of fear.

“This paper moves the field forward by about a century, because it actually identifies the proteins that are responsible for eliciting fear in mice,” says Leslie Vosshall, a neurobiologist at the Rockefeller University in New York City. It also shows that “Mups can be used not only for chemical conversations of animals in the same species, but they can also send information across species” [ScienceNOW].

Related Content:
80beats: Sniffing Out Sickness: Mouse Noses Respond to the Urine of Diseased Mice
80beats: Mammals Have a Nose for Danger (Literally)
80beats: Do Humans Communicate Via Pheromones? The Jury Is Still Out
DISCOVER: The Brain: The First Yardstick for Measuring Smells
DISCOVER: Top 100 Stories of 2009, #75: Yes, You Really Can Smell Fear

Image: iStockphoto

Speaking of Texas political goofballery…

I’ve written extensively about the maniacal practices of the Texas State Board of Education: promoting creationism, twisting reality, and most recently engaging in ridiculous historical revisionism. Because, after all, Joseph McCarthy was simply a misunderstood patriot.

<insert rolleyes here>

Well, there’s been an update to this insanity. Two actually: one is that the Texas BoE is now an international embarrassment, since the UK paper The Guardian has picked up on this story. I’d like to think that the more publicity this story gets, the more pressure there will be on Texas citizens to throw those antireality bums out of the BoE. However, I suspect that the people who voted them in in the first place will consider stories like this a badge of honor.

The second bit of news sounds good at first, but I don’t think will make much difference: a California legislator is introducing a bill that will make sure that any Texas nonsense introduced into textbooks will be reviewed by the California BoE, and the results reported both to the Legislature and the secretary of education.

Personally, I don’t see much use for this bill. The concern behind it is that the decisions made by the Texas BoE have national ramifications, since they have such a huge educational system that it’s easier for textbook publishers to simply use the Texas standards in their books that they sell in the national market. That’s not strictly the case; in reality there are four very large markets that influence textbooks (California is bigger than Texas, in fact, and the other two are Florida and New York). It is true, though, to the best of my knowledge, that Texas does unduly influence the way education is presented in textbooks in national markets, however. I used to work in this business, and talked to quite a few teachers, educational experts, and people who helped create national education standards, so I have some experience in this.

Be that as it may, the California bill doesn’t really do much. It just says that the California BoE has to report any problems they see, but it’s vague on the next step. Even a staff member of Leland Yee, who introduced the bill, says it’s just a precautionary measure. It strikes me that the California BoE should be doing stuff like this anyway, so I’m unsure of the efficacy of a bill like this.

I’ll note that in 2005, Yee passed bills making it illegal to sell video games rated M to minors. I’m a bit of a libertarian when it comes to such things; while I don’t think young kids should be playing violent video games, I don’t think it’s the government’s place to be making it illegal. It strikes me as the government being in loco parentis, as well as just being a bandaid on a much larger issue.

This new BoE bill appears to me to be more of the same thing. We’ll see. I will add one thing: despite my admonitions above, I’m very glad that the government of a big state sees right through the snake oil the Texas BoE is peddling. While I don’t think California needs legislation to make sure the Texas BoE silliness doesn’t infect other states, they certainly need to keep a jaundiced eye on it.

Tip o’ the mortarboard to Slashdot.

It is no secret that our book, Unscientific America, which will soon release in paperback, displeased many New Atheists. They didn't much like the argument that science and religion can work together, rather than always being at odds; that constant warfare between the two isn't necessary, and can be destructive. But don't forget that there is another side in this debate that is also devoted to incompatibility, rather than reconciliation--the anti-science "intelligent design" types. Here is none other than Casey Luskin of the Discovery Institute criticizing those like myself, or Michael Ruse, who are atheists but also take a compatibilist stance:
So it turns out that atheists like Ruse and Mooney promote compatibility between God and evolution out of constitutional concerns. They fear that if atheism and evolution become too closely linked, this could make the teaching of evolution unconstitutional. Thus, they feel they’d better fix the problem by going around preaching that God and evolution are compatible.
Now they might genuinely believe it’s possible to reconcile God and evolution, but then again, don’t forget we’re talking about ardent evolutionists and atheists who personally reject belief in God and expressly admit legally / politically oriented motives for pushing the compatibilist perspective. Isn’t that ...

An SDO image of a region on the Sun (described below). Click for larger. Image and movie: SDO (NASA) and the AIA, EVE, and/or AIA consortium.

We have above as described by NASA, an AIA image in 193 Å after a solar eruption and a flare. The dark regions show the site of evacuated material from the eruption, and the large magnetic loops were formed during the flare.

The Solar Dynamics Observatory entered “Phase E” just a few days ago. “Phase E” is the science part of the mission.  As part of the mission the spacecraft is sending 1.5 Terabytes of data daily to Earth (yes  bytes). Good thing they can cherry pick the data they want to see because that data rate is expected to continue until at least 2015.

The caption says this is an AIA image.  AIA stands for Atmospheric Imaging Assembly and it is designed to provide a look at the solar corona.  To understand the image a little more, click here to see a Quicktime movie of the area.

You can read more about the AIA here.