The Car Hacker’s Handbook from Craig Smith is available at Humble Bundle for 1$.
Humble Bundle Hacking Reloaded: https://www.humblebundle.com/books/hacking-reloaded-books
Car Hacking Handbook has been Creative Commons for a while. It is actually free for the electronic version.
Thanks, I didn’t’ know that.
Have a link to the free one?
Here is the main site for items related to the Car Hackers Handbook… Also includes a link to the book.
I’ve found it’s basically outdated per todays standards
It is continually updated by one of the most active hackers in the business so I am not sure how you can say it is out dated. You can also get added to the OpenGarages mail list which really is the latest that is in the industry. The only way you are going to be more up to date is to work for someone that is an industry leader in this field.
I think what dsminva probably means is that the Car Hacker’s handbook really doesn’t get into the nitty-gritty of UDS and Global-A and all the really fun stuff. It’s more of a surface level book that gets people into the high level details but doesn’t delve down into the low level stuff where you’re updating firmware and changing parameters in the ECU. This is true but people have to start somewhere. Eventually perhaps the book will expand to include some of the lower level details.
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And the lower level stuff would be more dependent on the manufacturer of the car, can be very specific to model and year and have lots of other stuff involved. With the experience I am gaining with flashing older GM modules it is apparent that a lot of the GM stuff is pretty complicated and other than people working for a manufacturer of the modules leaking information it is really hard to get solid information. You really need to have a lead on some of the stuff before you can reverse engineer it and try to get stuff working with it.
That is true. Some things like Global-A are reasonably standard across a range of vehicles (in this case most GM vehicles) but still things do fracture quite a bit. UDS is a standard but the actual IDs and PIDs used are quite often not so any way you go once you get to the low level stuff it is very proprietary. But, it could be possible for the book to delve more into how to use UDS and such in a generic sense and people would then have to fill in the gaps with the proprietary bits. Though, those aren’t really gaps in so much as the actual meat.
Collin hit it exactly. For most of us here, with an M2, the handbook is childs play, and we have evolved beyond that. I’d really like to see something that covers more in depth with the different manufacturers, or at a very minimum, reference some of the useful points of interest out there. GMW3110 for GM for example.
But hey, it’s a free book that the kiddos can start with.
BTW- the older GM stuff is cake. Serial EEPROMS can be gotten into extremely easy. Even bus level is easy. I hacked my first cluster some years back using a floppy drive ribbon cable lol