If you watched CBS's 60 Minutes program on Sunday, Febrary 8, you missed seeing the CSE logo. As part of a broader feature on information security research undertaken with support from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the TV newsmagazine showcased the joint research on automotive hacking undertaken by researchers at the University of Washington and faculty in the Computer Science and Engineering department at UC San Diego, which together created the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security. The car hacking portion of the 60 Minutes program was filmed entirely in Seattle, so members of the San Diego team (including CSE professors Stefan Savage and Hovav Shacham) did not get any 'face time' in the TV report. Indeed, CBS producers decided in the end to delete all names of people and institutions, except for DARPA, so the CSE and UW logos on the test car used by correspondent Lesley Stahl were covered over in the final version of the broadcast.
The demonstrations captured for CBS occurred last August, when 60 Minutes deployed a phalanx of cameras on and around the test car to demonstrate an escalating level of threat scenarios involving wireless hacking of a car's computer system (what researchers called 'remote exploit control' in a landmark 2011 paper at the USENIX Security Symposium). For the 60 Minutes program, Lesley Stahl was in the driver's seat of the wirelessly-hacked automobile, and at various points, she lost control of the breaks, the steering wheel, the windshield wipers, even the speedometer (which showed the car in "park" even though it was clearly accelerating).
As CSE's top expert on automotive hacking, Prof. Stefan Savage noted recently that there has been a lot of cross-over of personnel between UC San Diego and UW, in both directions. Case in point: UW professor Tadayoshi Kohno was an early collaborator on the project while he was finishing his Ph.D. at UC San Diego. In the other direction, the lead Ph.D. student at UW, Karl Koscher (right), recently graduated and is now a postdoctoral researcher in Savage's group at UC San Diego. (Koscher was visible in the 60 Minutes segment, playing the role of the hacker who wirelessly took control of the car's functions even as CBS's Lesley Stahl was driving.)
Watch the DARPA segment on the CBS 60 Minutes website.
Read the 2010 and 2011 papers from the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security.