Examining, reporting, and eventually litigating the ins and outs of emissions control software is beside the point. This could have been, was, detected by measuring the junk coming out the tailpipe.
The thing to do is to allow researchers to test cars in realworld situations and then actually listen to them when they report anomalies.
I think you are dangerously wrong on that point. Of course the EFF has an agenda which colours their argument, but right now the DMCA is being used to prevent independent scrutiny of devices that are essential to people's lives.
"Testing cars in real-world situations" is only a small part of a vehicle testing procedure. Remember the Toyota uncontrolled acceleration thingy? That was tested in real-world situations multiple times, yet still people died because of it. Toyota had been succesfully dodging liability until they were forced to open up their source code.
"Listen to researchers" is moot if the researchers are forbidden from researching parts independently.
America's sheer size and influence dominates the world. Even in fields that are not of concern to the rest of the world, countries tow the line to keep this gorilla happy.
True - none of our politicians are going to take on the gorilla. It would only hurt them and us. So if it wants the gorilla gets to set the rules for everyone else - vote or no vote.
That is a self fulfilling prophecy. It is quite ironic that a European company has devolved to committing fraud to try to get around stricter emission rules in the US.
The big if here is that anyone would have bothered in the first place. There are far more enticing targets the DMCA puts out of reach, emission software doesn't ever seem to get mention but we can sure it will in the future.
What I want to see is that all current cars are put through the wringer to insure no other manufacturer is gaming the system.
That's still reactionary policy: "Ooh, we discovered it's possible to game the system doing X. Let's do more black-box testing and specifically look for X." I agree that's par for the course for the hamstrung Congress, but let's not taint ideological discourse with pessimistic realism.
It's also ignoring the larger picture, which I've seen echoed more across this thread: the software governing physical processes should not receive more protection than the physical process itself. Black-box testing is a very poor substitute for dismantling and testing each part in isolation, and if manufacturers are able to subvert regulation by encoding the more useful bits in software and then claim "IP" or "DMCA", expect to see more of these things in the future, not less.
So personally, I would go much further in my suggested response (but I'm not a politician): given the active subversion performed here, I would halt all sales and imports of VW products until they share all source code for their entire (US) range. That should serve as a better deterrent than fines IMHO.
> So personally, I would go much further in my suggested response (but I'm not a politician): given the active subversion performed here, I would halt all sales and imports of VW products until they share all source code for their entire (US) range. That should serve as a better deterrent than fines IMHO.
Why not just require that for all cars? It seems a completely sensible policy. Just doing it after a manufacturer has been caught cheating is a reactionary view too.
>> I think you are dangerously wrong on that point. Of course the EFF has an agenda which colours their argument, but right now the DMCA is being used to prevent independent scrutiny of devices that are essential to people's lives.
How so? I think the EFF is going a bit off track here. They seem to imply that source code is required for independent testing. If we assume that's true, who gets to see it? How do they get to use it?
Emissions tests are circumvented by knowing the test conditions and/or sequence and having software behave differently during the test. You can either try to understand the software, or you can just change your testing sequence. Which seems more reasonable?
Now what if China wants to see your code to verify compliance? And Germany, and France, and every country to sell cars in.
>They seem to imply that source code is required for independent testing.
That is most certainly NOT what the EFF is implying. They are asking for an exemption to the DMCA, not access to anyone's original source code. When they say "Automakers argue that it’s unlawful for independent researchers to look at the code that controls vehicles without the manufacturer’s permission," they're not talking about "you should have a legal obligation to give us your human-readable source code," they're talking about "You shouldn't be able to sue us for copyright infringement when we analyze the firmware on our cars." Car manufacturers argue that people don't really own cars, and that any attempt to look at the software that manages them is in violation of the DMCA.You can read more about it here:
The kind of thing the EFF is trying to legally access is already shipped in every vehicle that goes to China (or anywhere), where they don't have the DMCA and probably are already examining it - just not for our benefit.
> If we assume that's true, who gets to see it? How do they get to use it?
Everyone? What would be the harm?
> Now what if China wants to see your code to verify compliance? And Germany, and France, and every country to sell cars in.
Show them the code.
Before cars were run with software, it was possible to buy a car, take it apart, measure every single part, and construct a copy. You could learn everything about a car by examining a car. The fact that this was possible did not prevent the U.S. auto industry from succeeding financially. It did not hurt anyone.
I can't think of a reason that would be different today. The DMCA was enacted to protected creative works, in which the IP represents the entirety of the value. Software that runs hardware is not the same thing and should not be accorded the same protections.
As we learned from Toyota, these protections have enabled absolutely terrible software development practices. Third-party inspection would provide pressure to improve that. Imagine if Consumer Reports had electric engineers and software engineers on staff and their car reviews included scores for code quality and proper safety checks. I think that would be good for everyone, including car companies.
I don't think they're implying that, I think they're saying that searching through the source code could have identified this issue years earlier, which I think is 100% possible, but not guaranteed.
I mean, how do you know the source code for this "cheat" wasn't 100% obvious, such that looking at the code would have revealed itself right away? Obviously, no one can know that right now, since it's protected under DMCA, but what if.....
A random sample of each make and model of car should be periodically put through far more stringent testing than normal, in an effort to catch this kind of thing. Allowing this cheat to go undetected for so long speaks to the failure of the testing regime.
Let's not pretend that there aren't problems there too.
In reality, it is very helpful to have a carefully controlled, consistent test so that comparisons between vehicles are apples to apples. Variances in the real world will be argued as inevitable, and very quickly you'll find the industry converges on how likely it is that a give variance is "acceptable/plausible", and then you'll have engineers designing for that variance....
The "emissions cheat" in question altered the output of the car when it was being tested. So, they were testing the emissions that came out of the car.
"EPA regulators said that Volkswagen adopted a 'sophisticated' algorithm that turned on vehicles' full emissions controls when it detected they were being tested for emissions performance." - http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/cars/2015/09/18/epa-accu...
have you ever got software certified for the government or military? It's daunting at first, you know there are problems. As the process goes along though, it's just a financial process. You pay a government contractor to write some documentation and it's the documentation that is "tested". It just takes time and it's not cheap, it has little to do with security.
The epa tests are for beaurocrats, now maybe the world is changing but I suspect that if you could simply plug a usb stick in to your car and get better mileage and more power, at the cost of some nitrogen, a ton of people would do it, maybe most would. If it was really important, they'd require the cars to have real time sensors as standard equipment and put some of the responsibility on the driver too. VAG just played along and made the game more efficient. Not that I agree with it, it sucks, but the system was built to be gamed, it's broken
The testing was in place, but the software was designed to detect the testing process. A simple hack would be something like: (Hood open)or(doors open)+(Throttle>0)=I'm being tested. That would be enough to hide from standard testing procedures.
Systems designed to defeat specific test are nothing new. The biggest example I can think of are the Buell (Harley) bikes that use an exhaust bypass designed to keep the bike quite at RPMs used during the CA test.
The emissions test takes place on a dynamometer, which would result in a large number of weird things the car could test for.
Such as open doors/hood while the wheels are spinning, no acceleration or a stationary GPS signal.
The fact that cars have GPSs, make it next to impossible to design tests that can't be cheated, you would need a testing rig that could be mounted on a moving car, that didn't cause an increase of pressure on the exhaust system (cars could detect that) And then you would need to do testing on public roads, so the car didn't switch to a different mode when it's GPS showed it was on a known test track.
Volkswagen used a ECM that sensed if the vehicle was being tested based on various inputs including the position of the steering wheel, vehicle speed, the duration of the engine's operation, and barometric pressure.
(source EPA.gov)
In my state, PA, they use an inductive pickup on the spark plug wire for cylinder #1 to determine the RPMs and a probe that's inserted into the tailpipe. The probe is a small diameter (0.5" or less) tube and it shouldn't raise the back pressure by any appreciable amount.
Maybe an EE could tell us if it's possible for the ECM to detect the presence of the inductive pickup.
EE here. Technically it's possible to detect an inductive pickup. But they are pretty subtle. You would probably need a very specially designed coilpack.
You can't, but that doesn't really affect the cheat. I mean you could do: if gps not available default to clean mode. That would benefit you during testing or when you're in an underground garage or tunnel (Places where you would like to have as clean exhaust as possible anyway).
There is talk of emissions controls being linked to GPS location so that each country/state/city might enforce different emissions rules. Some high-end Japanese machines already use GPS to determine whether or not they are on a racetrack, opening up performance and speeds normally locked away while on public roads.
It is very practical - the whole Volkswagen scandal is caused by the fact that the compromise of low emissions vs better performance and mileage can be dynamically changed by software, and that a car that can conform to the tightest standard still would prefer use a mode with higher emissions whenever and wherever allowed.
It would enable your car to suddenly perform better as soon as you enter a state with less strict emission requirements, or vice-versa, your usually high emission car would be legal to operate when visiting stricter places because it can switch to a limited more when needed.
The thing to do is to allow researchers to test cars in realworld situations and then actually listen to them when they report anomalies.