There has been much buzz about car hacking, but what about the larger heavy-duty brother, the big rig? Heavy trucks are increasingly networked, connected and susceptible to attack. Networks inside trucks frequently use Internet connected devices even on safety-critical networks where access to brakes and engine control is possible. Unfortunately, tools for doing analysis on heavy trucks are expensive and proprietary. Six_Volts and Haystack have put together a set of tools that include open hardware and software to make analyzing these beasts easier and more affordable.
Six_Volts is a "research mercenary" and has worked on High Performance Computing, embedded systems, vehicle networking and forensics, electronics prototyping and design, among other things. He's crashed cars for science, done digital forensics on a tangled mess of wires that used to be a semi truck, built HPC clusters out of old (and new) hardware, designed tools to extract data from vehicle EDRs, and in his spare time trains teams of students to defend enterprise networks. Twitter: @Six_Volts
Haystack Haystack was a computer science student researching process control security, when one day he was recruited by a nefarious mechanical engineering professor hell-bent on dominating the field of accident reconstruction. After a series of dangerous training missions to various accident sites and junkyards, Haystack can now cut electronic control modules from wrecked trucks with surgical precision and extract crash data from them that was previously thought to be unrecoverable.