There are plenty of people out there excited by the idea of the self-driving car. From its potential to reduce accidents due to drunk driving, distracted driving, or anything else to its potential to open up the world for those who might not ordinarily be able to drive, there are benefits aplenty to this new technology. But amid reports that Tesla might be the next automaker to add the necessary systems to its line of cars, there are new concerns that suggest tomorrow's cars may also serve as tomorrow's criminals as well.

The problem is a comparatively standard one, according to IHS (News - Alert) Automotive's Egil Juliussen, who noted that a car's electronics generally don't have much in the way of security, so a hacker being able to gain access to that car's systems may be comparatively simple. Juliussen serves as IHS Automotive's director of research for infotainment and advanced driver assistance systems, putting him in an excellent position to understand this point.

Juliussen goes on to note that, while there's little information contained in a car that would be useful for the typical hacker, there's another point which could instead prove valuable. A self-driving car that was controlled by external forces, Juliussen notes, could be used for a variety of nefarious purposes, ranging from making traffic snarls to performing vehicular assassinations. While Juliussen also notes that there are points involving intellectual property theft or the attack on an automaker's reputation, much of Juliussen's commentary seems to mirror that of a report from U.K. newspaper The Guardian back in July, pointed out how self-driving cars had the potential to be used as terrorist weapons.

However, this may already prove to be a moot point; a research paper from 2011, a product of the University of Washington and the University of California – San Diego, pointed out how to hack a car wirelessly. The auto industry, in turn, began “waking up” to the threats posed and responded accordingly with new security measures, though it would take “...several years...” to actually see the measures in place in available vehicles, according to Juliussen.

It's also worth noting here that it would likely also take several years for the self-driving systems to actually show up in available vehicles anyway, so this might be a case, ultimately, where the security arrives at about the same time as the driverless systems do. That's leaving aside the potential for a hacked driverless car's connectivity systems to be another node in an extended botnet used against systems in distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks or the like. However, the point remains; no automaker wants the business' name attached to a report involving things like gas station mishaps or vehicular homicide, particularly when it would look here like a matter of failure on the automaker's part rather than on the operator's. So adding tight security measures and the like becomes particularly important as operator liability would likely shift out of the operator's hands and into the manufacturers'. After all, in a self-driving car, the operator is more a backup system than the primary operator.

Only time will tell just what all comes of this, but it's a pretty safe bet that driverless cars will not only be safer in the near term, but also more secure as well as automakers seek to keep the new breed of car out of the press for all the wrong reasons.