Personally, I’m not a fan of trying to legislate stuff like this. If we are talking financial systems or life-saving medical devices, sure (and they are to a point, although poorly in my opinion). Wireless shifting can self-police as far as I’m concerned. If a company is exposed as having poor security compared to other options, let the market speak with their purchasing behavior. If some riders lose a race by being hacked, so be it (and it’s on them for not vetting their equipment if the race was really important). The government has a very, very limited amount of brainpower in this space, non-critical consumer stuff is not where they should be focusing their efforts in my opinion.
And one thing I’ve learned from years of security is that nothing is truly secure. The best approach is often the classic - “You don’t need to run faster than the bear chasing you, you just need to run faster than the other people around you”. At an individual level, just don’t make yourself an easy target (change passwords, etc.) and the odds will be in your favor. Criminals/hackers are smart, but they are generally lazy.
As someone who struggles to understand a lot of this stuff - (for example I have no clue how I’d go about changing the Wi-Fi password / code for my wireless router that my broadband supplier provided) it seems daunting to hear all these potential pitfalls arising from security flaws in the modern technology that is an ever present integral part of almost every piece of household or other equipment sold these days.
I recognise some of it may be an overreaction but the general sense of concern doesn’t escape my attention.
Bike wise I’m not sure it’s an issue that will ever affect me.
More generally, it’s definitely something I do wish I knew more about to help me make more informed decisions and take basic sensible steps to secure my property or information.
I’m skeptical of the ability to hack or influence a rider at they cruise by at 50+kph.
So you cause a miss-shift, so what? Maybe you could brick their gears in that microsecond of time (unlikely) but even so, they would just get a new bike like with any other mechanical.
The worst case would be causing a crash in a sprint but still, that happens all the time.
The 2nd worse to me would be another team targeting a rival during an important ITT. But they would have to have these devices positioned all over the course and mess with the rider’s gears multiple times to have a large impact on the final result.
A large part of my role is security focused in an industry where security matters more than than in most, so hopefully I have some security knowledge. There’s a line between being security conscious and paranoid, and I’d rather spend my energy elsewhere tbh. While riding I use a power meter, wireless shifting, heart rate strap and don’t spend an ounce of energy worrying about security or interference issues with any. Why? Because the payoff, stakes, risk, and impact are so low, likelihood of anyone attempting to take advantage isn’t worth thinking about at this state. I’ve participated in an event with 2000+ participants, many of which will have relied on BT/ANT+ devices, and have had 0 issues with interference.
Should have Shimano done better? Yes. Should they patch? Yes, it seems they already did. Is this a cause for concern/alarm? With respect to bike drivetrains, absolutely not, let’s not get too ridiculous now.
A friend was on a ride, had his RD Di2 cable snag, wrap itself around the cassette, and yank the cable along with RD connector with it. Turned into a very expensive ride, as he needed a new RD (connector was fully ripped out), a new cable, and shop fees to replace everything. Wireless won’t have that issue, so there’s one problem it solves.
50km/h == 13.8m/s
Our experimental results show that we can perform replay attacks from up to 10 meters
using software-defined radios without any amplifiers. [1]
On a flat, your window of opportunity is <1.0 seconds, less on a descent, unless you can travel at a similar speed sufficiently within the 10m radius and operate this device. You can be luckier on a climb, especially if you were to run after the rider, so perhaps you’re looking at 20-30 seconds, depending on your personal fitness level. In other words, theoretical but highly impractical. Interesting mental exercise that is unlikely to result in any real-world application. I wouldn’t expect it to though, I suspect the point of the paper is to get some university credits as well as maybe raise general security awareness.
I guess my question is why is it “the future” (or the present). What is the advantage? For Di2, you already have a cable running from the seatpost (battery) to the RD and FD. You have a brake cable running from the brifter into the frame. I don’t see any advantage to not having a wire from the brifter to the battery in the frame. If you’re internally routed, it’s visually the same. For me, the frustration of setting up an additional internally routed cable is less than futzing with pairing electronics. The advantage you get with a wired setup is better battery life, fewer battery charges to keep track of, and easier roadside troubleshooting.
I recognize that I am a generally a Luddite, so I’m open to convincing arguments about why wireless is categorically better than wired other than preference. I run a wireless setup on my gravel bike and wired setup on my road bike…I’m probably going to transition my graveler to wired.
Right, that’s exactly point I was trying to make - wires are (or can be) a problem, and wireless solves that problem, where OP claimed wireless is trying to invent a problem to solve and is unnecessary.
This is all incredibly paranoid. And i find it funny that it’s used as a negative of wireless shifting. Sure it’s technically possible, in insanely specific circumstances, but it’s never happened.
I wonder what the legal repercussions of this would be, If one got caught doing it to affect a professional race.
If Shimano, Campagnolo, and Sram are all wireless then integrated cockpits of fancy bikes will no longer need special bars, stems or routing holes through the steerer tube.
I’m guessing that we will see ‘wireless only’ frames in the future just as we’ve had electronic only frames.
I’ve got a wired di2 road bike and have had more cable/connection problems than I have with SRAM axs wireless. I’ve also had di2 batteries slide down the seatpost a couple times. I guess you can blame the installer(me) for that, but it’s still something to deal with. I’ve had wired di2 on a couple bikes and while it’s been much more reliable and maintenance-free compared to cables, I’ve found wireless (at least sram’s version) to be better. I can’t even wrap my head around the hybrid wired/wireless thing shimano has done, but I guess reduced wiring is a step in the right direction.
But even assuming everything is 100% reliable, the ease of building/swapping with wireless components is so much better for me. Yeah, I’m lazy. But I do all my own work and just slapping components on vs. running cables/wires is such a joy. And with the interoperability of AXS, it’s so easy to reconfigure drivetrains based on courses/events. Less than 10 minutes to swap between 2x, 1x xplr, 1x eagle configurations (including cassettes and chainrings). Just unbolt old parts, bolt on new parts. I move my wireless blips between bikes frequently, takes less than 5 minutes. Same goes for backup parts. I’ve got 2 eagle RD’s, so if I’m travelling or have a big race, I’ll pull the extra RD off one bike and throw it in my parts bin to have a spare close at hand. I’d never do that if it was wired. I started with di2 wired many years ago and I like the convenience of having to charge one single large battery, but after having SRAM AXS on multiple bikes for years, I can’t see ever buying another wired groupset. I’m not bagging on di2, it shifts really well and I definitely prefer it to mechanical. Just trying to give some perspective on why I have a strong preference for wireless over wired.
I might be dense so I’m not trying to be a contrarian: why does the wire affect changing the RD? Switching between 2x to 1x I can see the problem. But to change the RD, you just unplug the wire from the RD, swap it out, and plug it back in. I unplug my RD all the time when traveling.
Look at the devices in your life: most of them have been migrating from a wired connection to a wireless connection. There are still cases where you need/prefer a wired connection, but typically, these are edge cases.
The lack of wireless is the reason why Shimano doesn’t currently offer 12-speed Di2 MTB group sets. Most high-end mountain bike have a dropper post where the Di2 battery goes on road bikes. Mountain bike frames make no accommodation for Di2 batteries, which means Shimano is screwed.
Since you want to reuse technology across your products, Shimano has no choice but to go wireless with their road group sets as well.
Lastly, you assume that cabled connections are always better or more reliable. That’s not always the case either, especially if you have to diagnose and deal with intermittent failures. I reckon that if you have a semi-faulty connector, it’d be a pain to find and fix.
Yeah, I guess for that I’m just comparing the current wireless offerings (sram) to the current wired offerings (shimano) rather than focusing on wires vs. wireless. Maybe not appropriate if we are just trying to debate the merits of wires vs. wireless, but that’s the current situation we have. AXS has a great ecosystem where everything works with everything while shimano does not.
And for what it’s worth, I’ve had crappy luck with the shimano wired connections, so I try not to mess with them. In my experience, once you’ve used those connectors enough times, they stop clicking firmly in place and can vibrate loose. And it’s not just me, I’ve had to help multiple people on group rides fiddle with their di2 connectors when something stopped working. Again, I guess it’s not a fundamental problem of wires vs. wireless, just that Shimano could have done a better job designing those wired connections. I’ve got a lot of miles on multiple bikes with both ecosystems and I’ve had issues with both, but way, way more issues with shimano wired.
Seems pertinent to the discussion to me: being wireless is one of the reasons it is easier to mix-and-match, me thinks. With AXS the hardware part of the standard seems mature and “fixed”, so all they need to do is update the firmware of the various components. I also like that their initial design of the battery is still in use today. Seems like they hit it out of the park. (Despite having ridding in torrential rains, zero issues.)
A patent is not a product. And brake by wire is not wireless. There is no wireless system described in that patent. Two out of the 3 require a physical connection. The third is ambiguous as to how it would work. But for reliability, a brake by wire system either has to have a redundant power source, or a way to mechanically actuate the brakes, which would make a fully wireless system quite an engineering challenge, because then you need some degree of redundancy in both the caliper, and the controller.
I’m not picking on you, honest. But you reflect the naïveté of countless wasted billions of when it did happen.
I live in an industry where insanely specific circumstances happened last week, again. It didn’t affect you. It didn’t affect your friends…that you know. But it affected someone somewhere in the world, and they’re feeling very foolish today.
The time wasted in arguing about it could easily be the time used to do things properly in the first place. Entrepreneurs. Mind. Blown.
