A few lessons from the Mazda radio incident. [Updated Feb 26 - see below] There was an entertaining story recently, about a set of radios in Mazdas that got stuck in a reboot cycle. It turns out that the issue was a local radio station was sending files without extensions via one of the digital channels that are now in a lot of what I still think of as analog radios. (These are how song names, and apparently more, can show up in your in-dash entertainment (IDE) units.) And as much fun as it was to make jokes like “but then you've pwned a Mazda,” I think there are some useful security engineering lessons we should take away.
I need an extension!
I need an extension!
I need an extension!
A few lessons from the Mazda radio incident. [Updated Feb 26 - see below] There was an entertaining story recently, about a set of radios in Mazdas that got stuck in a reboot cycle. It turns out that the issue was a local radio station was sending files without extensions via one of the digital channels that are now in a lot of what I still think of as analog radios. (These are how song names, and apparently more, can show up in your in-dash entertainment (IDE) units.) And as much fun as it was to make jokes like “but then you've pwned a Mazda,” I think there are some useful security engineering lessons we should take away.