“With the upcoming rise of self-driving and more connected vehicles come an increased risk of hacking those vehicles with ill-intent.
Elon Musk thinks that Tesla’s vehicle security software is the best solution and he plans to open-source it for free to other automakers for a safer self-driving future.
Musk has expressed concerns about hackers gaining access to Tesla system in the past.
He said that preventing a ‘fleet-wide hack’ is Tesla’s top security priority.
At the National Governors Association last year, Musk gave some more interesting insights into Tesla’s security effort and especially related to once their vehicles become fully autonomous:
“I think one of the biggest concern for autonomous vehicles is somebody achieving a fleet-wide hack.”
He followed with an interesting example of what someone could do with that kind of access:
“In principles, if someone was able to say hack all the autonomous Teslas, they could say – I mean just as a prank – they could say ‘send them all to Rhode Island’ [laugh] – across the United States… and that would be the end of Tesla and there would be a lot of angry people in Rhode Island.”
The CEO said that Tesla developed “specialized encryption” for “multiple sub-systems” in the vehicle and they are developing something for drivers to always have “override authority” if your autonomous vehicle starts doing something “wacky.””