Yet another Hacker News

Claude Code and Codex reverse engineered my 1994 Jeep's ECU over a $3 Arduino [video]

51 points envoked 3 days ago 18 comments

aiiotnoodle 52 minutes ago | parent

Would love to see this being used to add keys to cars. A lot of cars now have tablets and screens that could be used to do this, but for some reason (money) I have to take my VW to the dealer...

I think the whole market for aftermarket keys could be completely eradicated with good software UX (and low pricing).

trollbridge 42 minutes ago | parent

Good luck with Claude not just immediately giving you a refusal.

prodigycorp 27 minutes ago | parent

Codex would

qingcharles 6 minutes ago | parent

Not these days. It won't even look at my projects for security flaws any longer. Has a little pop-up that says "This output cannot be viewed." or some such.

Have to make the Chinese one do it.

misterderpie 46 minutes ago | parent

LLMs end up changing the consumer market not the way big corporations would like to. It is impressive to see that we'll be able to give ownership back to the customer, or enable others to do so. Very nice demonstration.

close04 34 minutes ago | parent

Wait until those big corporations start using LLMs to learn how to lock things down even further, or implement checks that disable your car when it detects alterations to the software “for safety reasons”, or go after drivers who do these things for loss of revenue, etc. A ‘94 Jeep will be fair game but a new car might not be.

SV_BubbleTime 28 minutes ago | parent

New cars already have it.

Lockstep processors, hardware security modules with immutable unreadable keys, and PKI keys that the mfg holds the private for that can only be accessed on their online services.

It’s locked down now and this started in 2018 or so. It’s just worse now.

To automotive, there is really still no right to repair. They get around it by selling “3 day passes” to their service, but with their hardware and at their prices.

They’re all moving the Tesla system of more centralized brain systems which will be even more protected.

dawnerd 27 minutes ago | parent

Which also has the real nifty benefit of a RRS via subscriptions!

misterderpie 23 minutes ago | parent

Sad to hear. I am not a car owner, but lived in the EU for most of my life. The consumer market owes quite some consumer rights to the EU, so I guess all we can do is hope that they'll eventually crack down on these measurements again.

dns_snek 25 minutes ago | parent

They've been doing that for a decade. I think overall the balance will shift in our favor but Big AI labs will do everything they can to try and stop us.

Claude is quick to refuse to help with reverse engineering and I suspect it's only going to get worse over time.

close04 15 minutes ago | parent

Yes, they have been on that road for years. Tesla showed everyone the way with things like not being able to change a headlight with another original one without Tesla’s blessing. What I meant is that whatever I can do with an LLM they can do more. And if they can invoke “safety” that'll have the law on their side for some time.

As far as I can tell no manufacturer disables the car yet when detecting modifications, or take drivers to court for doing it, yet.

muststopmyths 37 minutes ago | parent

can someone explain the root cause of the smog test failure to me ? it sounds like the car was using a California smog test-specific fuel map at the speeds of the test. Wouldn't that make it pass the test, not fail it ?

very cool project anyway.

threetonesun 17 minutes ago | parent

Yeah doesn’t really make sense, there’s very likely a mechanical issue the LLM “fixed” with a richer fuel mix. But also it’s a 94 XJ the reason the CA map was there was probably because they got abhorrent gas mileage without it.

KolmogorovComp 33 minutes ago | parent

The tech is impressive but the animation in the video are too, anyone knows what was used to generate them?

prodigycorp 28 minutes ago | parent

claude can do that lol

prodigycorp 25 minutes ago | parent

Claude reverse engineered his car, drew the animations, and wrote the script for video. Incredibly weird meat proxy moment.

dghlsakjg 18 minutes ago | parent

It also didn’t solve the root cause of the issue. ECUs don’t need to be overwritten to get stock performance and emissions. Something is wrong with hardware/mechanical that needs to be solved.

What he did was technically interesting, but probably not a great solution to the actual problem.

IshKebab 24 minutes ago | parent

Manufacturers are going to start cryptographically locking everything down rather than relying on the time and skill needed to do reverse engineering.