原创 Hacking: Just another stage of tech life cycle?

Amid a huge number of recent news stories about systems getting hacked I read several in the area of IoT about Zigbee getting hacked, Chrysler getting hacked, and Tesla getting both hacked and fixed. Granted, part of the rush came from the recent DEFCON conference in Las Vegas, but such stories still can be very depressing for engineers trying to build the next generation of devices. Are we really doing the world a favor by creating ever more complex systems that inevitably expose the users to hackers?

This got me thinking about the nature of system development. We have all seen descriptions of the various stages of maturity for any technology, but I realized that the ones I have seen are missing a step. Consider the one below.

A more realistic description of the stages of technology.

 

The first three stages are familiar, but consider the consequence of implementing a design to make it broadly useful. That wider audience is also what makes it interesting to hackers. There is really no point to hacking something that no one is using, and new technology is always the most fertile ground in terms of complexity and the availability of exploitable holes. It seems like these days a new technology barely has a chance to enjoy being in the ‘Useful’ stage before it gets pushed into the ‘Abuse-able’ stage.

Up until now I have carefully avoided characterizing the hacking involved as being “white hat” or “black hat” hacking. In fact, even those two characterizations are too limiting. The only difference between them is if the flaw is discovered by the good guys or the bad guys. What I have come to realize over the years is that the world is infinitely more complex than that.

Right now we have encryption technology that is good enough that the FBI is very publicly calling for the creation of back doors into it. Their rationale is that the bad guys are using it too effectively to do what they do that makes them bad. That is a very reasonable argument when the FBI is hunting pedophiles. Does the same argument hold when it is the Chinese government that is hunting underground discussion of the Tiananmen Square massacre? The definition of good guys and bad guys is very open to interpretation.

Garage mechanics have been hacking cars just about as long as there have been cars in an effort to make them faster or in some other way more interesting. This is considered abuse by the car manufacturers and the government regulators, but it is very different from finding ways to break into or take control of someone else’s car.

Whether any type of hacking of a new technology is good or bad is a judgement that largely depends on how the hack is used. As I said, the world is an infinitely complex place – this is what makes it interesting. Whether or not we are really making it better by making it even more complex is a question that we each have to answer for ourselves.

Larry Mittag is a consultant on connected embedded systems.