Can Self Driving Cars Be Secured? Car Hacking Duo Isn’t Sure

Researchers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek warn that securing consumer-owned autonomous vehicles is substantially harder than corporate fleets, citing outdated automotive standards (CAN bus limitations, unencrypted UDP-based in-vehicle Ethernet), long supply chains, and the difficulty of applying regular updates to dispersed vehicles; they recommend reducing attack surface, verifying signed firmware/software, encrypting outbound data, and designing flexible, iterative security rather than assuming a one-time fix.