Dec 19 2015

Japanese cars could be hacked and remote controlled through smartphones if they were equipped with devices connected to the Internet, according to an experiment conducted by an associate professor at Hiroshima City Universitys Graduate School of Information Sciences.

In the experiment, Hiroyuki Inoue remotely opened and closed car windows, displayed an incorrect speed meter reading and paralyzed the car’s accelerator, although the effects do not directly apply to cars currently on the market as their computers have no Internet access, he said.

But Inoue warns that cars privately altered and attached with Internet devices could be hacked as Japanese manufacturers are developing Internet linked technologies such as self driving vehicles.

He announced the details of the experiment at a symposium on cyber security starting Tuesday in Okinawa.

What Inoue used are Toyota Motor Corp’s Corolla Fielder Hybrid, which went on sale in 2013, a Wi-Fi device he assembled with commercially available parts that cost only about 10,000 yen and a smartphone app he developed to remote-control the vehicle.

By connecting the Wi-Fi device to a certain terminal of the car, which is about 5 centimeters long and is usually used to attach a checking device for maintenance work, he succeeded in gaining access to unencrypted data inside the car’s computer, which controls the engine, brake and other functions.

As a result, the hacked vehicle showed a reading of 180 kilometers per hour on its speed display even though it was parked.

The car was also paralyzed when it was overwhelmed with much higher than normal levels of data traffic, which is technically called distributed denial of service or DDoS attacks, with the driver unable to move the car even when hitting the accelerator.

But the maneuver could not start the engine or move the steering wheel, Inoue said.

Important (data) communication was in full view from outside. Other cars could also be subject to hacking in the same way,he said, calling for the need to encrypt data communication of cars’ internal computers and take steps to protect the systems from unnecessary access from outside.

An official at the Japan Automobile Manufacturers Association said the industry will work on measures to deal with the issue by cooperating with the government.

Toyota separately told Kyodo News that the company will continue making efforts to enhance protection on information security.