SwiftOnSecurityI absolutely do not drive through any water that isn't a trivial puddle. I don't care if I see other cars going through it, I don't follow people into minefields just because they got through. Further, the absolute nightmare stories about years after getting car electronics wet means even if your footwell stays dry your car's internals do not. My time is worth money and that means not fucking with my car's reliability.
I believe that although nebulous appeals to safety have their place in physical and cyber, so many risks are perfectly individually rational to avoid and can be explained that way. I am absolutely not going through trying to get wire harness corrosion fixed in a modern car even if I had infinite money.
There was a story recently about how a major manufacturer rushed the development of a car, and later models had like 10 miles less electrical cable in them because they had time to optimize those routes in all the harnesses. The electrical is IMMENSE. You're driving basically a huge CPU and I don't put my god damn PC in muddy water.
Carmen Crincoli@SwiftOnSecurity I can't give away details, but in discussions with one of the large European auto manufacturers about their technology, they mentioned that their current cars have over 50 unique ARM processors of various specs and capabilities in them, and that number was expected to exceed 100 shortly. (This was pre pandemic chip shortage.)
Your car isn't a CPU. It's a distributed compute cluster.
Mike Meadway 🇺🇸 🇩🇰 🇬🇧@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity Tie it together with CAN, and you have a classic "actor model" system 🙂
mhoye@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity I wonder how many of the world's traffic problems we could solve by telling the bitcoin people how regenerative braking works.
nintegge
John Breen@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity I can tell you one thing for sure. If I'm an electric car running on batteries and solar cells, the last thing I want is feeding the heat dissipation of 100 ARM processors. One should really be enough, maybe 3. RaspberryPI Corvette...
@jab01701mid @SwiftOnSecurity Remember ARM is an architecture not an implementation. There are a lot of ARM devices out there can do useful things for a fraction of a watt on a sliver of silicon. Not all of them have to be multicore big+LITTLE monsters that power phones, tablets, etc.
@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity Good point - M0 vs M7 platforms. We can have a few dozen M0 platforms :)
@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity Connectorization tends to be the limiting factor - every connector is an opportunity for failure, even with great reliability from the components.
AMS@jab01701mid @carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity These days a cortex M0 os cheaper than a few connector pins.
throAU@carmencr @jab01701mid @SwiftOnSecurity guessing a lot of the car processors are similar scale to the one in Apple Pencil.
Philip Mallegol-Hansen@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity I wonder how many of those are necessary, and how many exist only because it’s easier to buy another processor, than to change your code so that two different functions could be fulfilled by one.
@philip @SwiftOnSecurity I guess it depends on what you consider "necessary". What's the core functionality? What's the market differentiator? What are the alternatives that wouldn't increase the cost of the vehicle itself, or its R&D significantly?
There are well-established benefits to be had re-using exiting tooling at manufacturing scale.
mathew@carmencr @philip @SwiftOnSecurity Given the way car manufacturers write code, there’s a lot to be said for chopping it up into small pieces on separate CPUs, if only to force them not to use 10,000 global variables.
https://www.embedded.com/why-every-embedded-software-developer-should-care-about-the-toyota-verdict/
Brooks Davis@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity I’ve heard 300+ from a credible source, but keep in mind that many are infinitesimally small microcontrollers like the ones in cordless drills.
@brooks Oh, this was excluding microcontrollers (which aren't typically ARM from what I understand) that run various sub-functions around the car. This was general purpose ARM operating ancillary systems like radars for adaptive cruise control, inside cameras, etc.
Jonathan Polley@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity I was talking to one of me local car dealers recently and they said that they can’t get certain trim levels because of the additional processors needed. They’d rather build more cars than sell higher trim levels.
Byte⏩Shift@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity You're describing my house.
Toasterson (Till Wegmüller)@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity Somehow this reminds me of @oxidecomputer 's quiz how many days can go by before discovering a new CPU in your server.
Daniel Smith@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity Carbernetes
Peter Barnes@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity
Two mildly interesting observations: first, in the early 90s I was involved in the (then) SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) standard, and was slightly surprised that some of the most active people were from automotive IT. They knew what was coming… Second, some years back (pre widespread Bluetooth) I enquired after an aftermarket audio input, which my expensive European car strangely lacked. The cost was astronomical. Why? The entire cabin wiring was a fibre-optic bus, not copper…
Two mildly interesting observations: first, in the early 90s I was involved in the (then) SPICE (ISO/IEC 15504) standard, and was slightly surprised that some of the most active people were from automotive IT. They knew what was coming… Second, some years back (pre widespread Bluetooth) I enquired after an aftermarket audio input, which my expensive European car strangely lacked. The cost was astronomical. Why? The entire cabin wiring was a fibre-optic bus, not copper…
Julian Stecklina@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity Don't ask how many processors are in a laptop.
billseipel@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity People should be able to work on their own car. We're getting further from that.
Renato Ramonda@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity ...and a cluster that talks with horribly outdated and basically unfixable protocols by BOSCH, to boot.
(IIRC the way those famous exploits that could make Fiat-Chrysler cars break suddenly through a hacked infotainment were rather simple floods of malicious packets)
C.I was pretty sure that I had read that some high-end cars were already over 100 processors. There's a big push in this space to try to consolidate some of the workloads, including by containerizing as much as they can and running it on one bigger, multicore system. Fascinating.
⚙ARC@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity CAN bus lets goooo!
: j@fabrica:~/src; 
@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity this reminds me of @bcantrill’s talks about open source firmware and how many full SoC exist on Oxide’s rack component boards, they have too many and have to disable one just to eliminate attack surface.
Wildduck@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity i read during the pandemic chip shortage that before the pandemic, electronics accounted for a over 45% of the vehicule costs. Higher on electric ones.
Marcin Juszkiewicz 🙃@carmencr @SwiftOnSecurity work is going on to have Arm server built-in as well.