Why VW's court win helps hackers
Volkswagen recently won a court case that stopped computer scientists from publishing an academic paper revealing the secret codes used to start luxury cars including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis.
The victory, however, will make carmakers more vulnerable to hackers because company engineers will have less information available to help them design more secure in-car systems.
The academics wanted to add to a collective pool of knowledge that engineers could use to make systems more secure from attack. By having as much information as possible about security flaws, engineers are less prone to make design errors. The researchers are "white hats," meaning that they create hacks to discover how things work, and ultimately, how to remove security flaws in computer code.
