Remoticon Video: Learn How to Hack a Car with Amith Reddy

Remoticon Video: Learn How to Hack a Car with Amith Reddy

There was a time not too long ago when hacking a car more often than not involved literal hacking. Sheet metal was cut, engine cylinders were bored, and crankshafts were machined to increase piston travel. It was all in the pursuit of milking the last ounce performance out of every drop of gasoline, along with a little personal expression in the form of paint and chrome.


While it’s still possible — and encouraged — to hack cars thus, the inclusion of engine control units and other systems to our rides has created an entirely different universe of car hacking options, which Amith Reddy distilled into his very popular workshop at the 2020 Remoticon. The secret sauce behind all the hacks you can accomplish in today’s drive-by-wire cars is the Controller Area Network (CAN), the network used to connect the array of sensors, actuators, and controllers that lie under the metal and plastic of modern cars.

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The bulk of Amith’s workshop centered on how to receive and interpret CAN bus packets. The toolchain included can-utils, a collection of tools for inspecting and manipulating CAN packets, and ICSim, which simulates a generic car instrument cluster graphically. Using these, workshop participants were able to play with the virtual dashboard, open and close virtual doors, and observe the CAN packets responsible for it all as they fly across the network.


With the basics out of the way, the workshop moved on to real-world implementations of CANbus hacking, including tools to tap into the network via a car’s Onboard Diagnostics (OBD) port. There can be significant challenges here, including the dangers inherent when working with any large, powerful machine. The remoticon video learn amith reddy