In our CPEC Young Researchers Colloquium series, we invite young CPEC researchers to present their research to all of CPEC in a short and lightweight talk. We’re happy to announce the following talk:

Friday, February 18, 2:15pm: Sebastian Biewer (Universität des Saarlandes)

Software Doping and the Diesel Emissions Scandal

Embedded software is the innovation driver of our times. A tremendous problem is that the owners of physical devices are not the owners of the software running on it. In particular, they do not have the right to look at how the software is implemented, because commercial software is typically protected by intellectual property rights. An example of collective damage induced by software is at the root the Diesel Emissions Scandal, where millions of cars have been equipped with illegal software reducing the effectiveness of emission cleaning under real driving conditions.
Such undesired software behaviour is called software doping. In this talk, I will give an overview of how software doping can be formally defined and how to make software doping tests feasible in practice. Specifically, I will show how we applied this theory to diesel cars and how we allow all car owners to conduct their own emissions tests with their phones at low cost.