Enlisting the Public

Nat Beuse heads the office of vehicle safety research at N.H.T.S.A., the nation’s auto safety regulator. At a sprawling research lab in East Liberty, Ohio, a team of engineers from Mr. Beuse’s office are hacking into vehicles, tracking down safety defects as well as vulnerabilities that might allow an outsider to manipulate the critical functions of a car, like its brakes or steering.

It was in Ohio that the agency confirmed that a patch meant to fix the Jeep hacking would actually work. Now, N.H.T.S.A. investigators at the test facility are looking for vulnerabilities in other systems.

The agency is also testing a standard for writing code recently developed by the automakers. And it is studying whether black boxes in cars that record data, like a vehicle’s speed in a crash, can be programmed to record electronic faults.

But Mr. Beuse acknowledges that checking the millions of lines of code in automobiles is too gargantuan a task for regulators. In some cases, automakers can use two or three different versions of code in the same model year, he said.

“Whether you can actually police every little piece of software and electronics in a vehicle — I think the scope of that question is too large almost to answer,” he said. “What we’re focused on are very, very critical systems that affect safety — steering, throttle, braking and anything to do with battery systems.”

One model that N.H.T.S.A. has studied is the one now used by the Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates commercial aircraft. The F.A.A. dispatches representatives to plane manufacturers to directly oversee the software design process for the critical systems that control flying.

“They go in periodically, and say, ‘Show me what you’re doing and convince me that you’re doing a good job — or else I’m not signing off, and it’s not going in an airplane,’ ” Mr. Koopman of Carnegie Mellon said. “Can you tailor this so that it works for the car business? That’s a question I don’t have an answer for. But it’s clearly an option.”