Best N54 Tuner

[shushikiary]

Yea I have to sign them all the time for work as well. But people don't seem to understand what they are or what it means.

The tuners would be protected, assuming they are willing to go to court. If they could show that their tune got out, and from who, then the NDA would let you take the person who leaked it for all the damages.

I guess the problem would be the damages are usually more than one person could pay out, so you'd likely never really recover your money.

Maybe what we really need is something like public and private key. The tuner gives you a bin encrypted with a public key and you have the private key. Then add code to the ECU to use said private key to decrypt the tune, and you have to re-encrypt the tune after modification with the public key.

That way, you and only you can decrypt the tune to modify it your self, and if you gave it to anyone else they would just get gobly-goop and not be able to use it.

Best of both worlds... gee I wonder why HTTPS came up with doing that so many years ago.

 

[derekgates]

Yea I have to sign them all the time for work as well. But people don't seem to understand what they are or what it means.

The tuners would be protected, assuming they are willing to go to court. If they could show that their tune got out, and from who, then the NDA would let you take the person who leaked it for all the damages.

I guess the problem would be the damages are usually more than one person could pay out, so you'd likely never really recover your money.

Maybe what we really need is something like public and private key. The tuner gives you a bin encrypted with a public key and you have the private key. Then add code to the ECU to use said private key to decrypt the tune, and you have to re-encrypt the tune after modification with the public key.

That way, you and only you can decrypt the tune to modify it your self, and if you gave it to anyone else they would just get gobly-goop and not be able to use it.

Best of both worlds... gee I wonder why HTTPS came up with doing that so many years ago.

oh yes, I would love if MHD could create private keys for every registered account... then the key could be revoked for any reason and the culprit would have to make a new account and pay again...

Unfortunately, the rest of the tuning tools wouldn't adhere to that policy...


Maybe there is a signature added to each tune that still allows modification, but the absence of it would prevent flashing to the car with MHD?

 

[langsbr]

I offered to pay more and sign an nda to multiple tuners but they all declined.

I'd even be happy if mhd could have a "selective map unlock" feature, so I could edit basics like timing, fuel, flex fuel breakpoint, etc. Anything that would let me slightly customize the tune when needed.

 

[derekgates]

I offered to pay more and sign an nda to multiple tuners but they all declined.

I'd even be happy if mhd could have a "selective map unlock" feature, so I could edit basics like timing, fuel, flex fuel breakpoint, etc. Anything that would let me slightly customize the tune when needed.

Yes, or even a 'base map' that doesn't have all of the magic sauce but could provide a nice boost to starting out with the tune...

I am currently fighting throttle sensitivity tables and throttle response; a non-trivial amount of tune updates needed. Would be great to have my 'basic map' that I could then tweak the DCT from..


ah well, we can dream.

 

[shushikiary]

There are.... ways around this problem today, but I'll keep my mouth shut in public. Let's just say Toyota is the only company that has end to end encryption for the their firmware updates, and they use the same encryption for all their ECU's... and even then that encryption is already cracked. So it just takes some ingenuity.

I'd rather not do things that way though. It's to the advantage of the tuning community to implement the type of stuff we are talking about rather than resorting to brute force methods which then also allow bad actors to do things they shouldn't. You could tackle the bad actor problem and give the user more versatility while also reducing the work load on the tuners if they were willing to implement some of these things.

Right now the likely reason they do not is that the market is not big enough to justify the work (aka there are not enough of us who want it) and the bad actor problem is not a big enough problem either. If we were "benevolently evil" like robin hood, one could make an argument that showing people how easy it is to get the unlocked bin from a locked tune to create the bad actor problem could force their hand... but I find that kind of mental gymnastics to be...... immoral. People should do the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because they have to or else they will loose business.


I've had the same experience with tuners and asking to sign an NDA and get an unlocked tune. There was only one tuner who would sell me an unlocked tune, and it was great, but he's not around much anymore.

I think some form of signing or public/private encryption is the proper way to tackle this. But as you said... we can only dream. I guess if we really wanted to we could contact MHD and offer to try to develop this with them.

 

[derekgates]

Just call in @jyamona ... there is also an MHD Enhancements thread

MHD app enhancements thread

@jyamona said We will be actively seeking out suggestions for other improvements and features to add once the new apps release is behind us. I’ll start Investigate DCT TCU Coms. Find RPM shift request routine and allow a flash time only offset to cater for different final drives On the fly...

bmw.spoolstreet.com

I'd love to see something like 'base tune' offered from tuners, NDA possibilities, public/private key to unlock a tune for further tweaking, etc... In the long run it would reduce work for tuners and allow the customer to tweak, if they wanted to. The downside is any lost profits from a possible release of the unlocked tune and the full encryption, or system trust, is not going to happen in our BMW world.

For sure, these tunes could be cracked open... but I am not in this topic/conversation as a way to 'beat the tuner' but instead work with the tuner. The problem always comes down to bad actors. :\

 

[Jake@MHD]

The problem with an NDA'd and or key signed bin file is that once you have visible access to the table data, it doesn't matter if there is a key locking the bin. You can easily copy the table data individually, table by table, to a fresh bin. This would cause a ton of new age internet tuna to crop up, who would definitely be reselling the tuna that they purchased and studied for 5-10minutes. Hell, this already happened with a few people trying to sell the MHD OTS maps they got from a hacked apk.

 

[shushikiary]

The NDA is the legal protection against exactly that. If someone does do that, they broke the NDA and the tuner will easily win any legal action.

That of course ties back into my statements about the legal course might not be worth the money if said violator cannot pay up. You might be able to hope for criminal action, so the fear of going to jail might prevent it.

 

[Jake@MHD]

The NDA is the legal protection against exactly that. If someone does do that, they broke the NDA and the tuner will easily win any legal action.

That of course ties back into my statements about the legal course might be worth the money if said violator cannot pay up.

I understand that, but good luck tracking down who it actually is if they are clever about how they are selling them. And if you do narrow it down, good luck proving that they copied your file when they make a few small changes here and there, etc. It isn't really feasible IMO.

 

[shushikiary]

So how about we come up with a way to make it feasible?

A hidden watermark in said bin, like the signed signature we were talking about would be a start.

A brute force method would be to encrypt with the public key and only allow an application handed out by say MHD to modify the tune's tables, and prevent copy/past from said application. Thus if you wanted to copy it you'd have to use the image its self and do as a cell by cell copy by hand. Not perfect but it helps.

I mean today the only thing limiting bad actors from getting a bin is a few hundred dollars in equipment, and the industry seems to trust that barrier to entry pretty well.

Thinking about it some more... that's how SCT does their stuff really. You have to pay to get Advantage and use it, so at the end of the day you have a much smaller pool of people to worry about who could steel your tune. Have all your tuners need to use the program and pay for it, and then just never give out the bin. Though with the XDF's in the wild today it's not as good as it is with the SCT stuff because there you can't get the XDF, so it's really hard to just copy the data from the tune over. The cat is kind of out of the bag already with the XDF's being out and about.....

But you could counter act that by making it so MHD won't download bins, only MHD files, which would then eliminate the XDF problem, then the public private key idea would work great.

 

[derekgates]

Or what if you could apply a 'differencing' tune... that overrode or adjusted tables already defined by your tuner, from their locked file? That way you could affect some of the tables without knowing their values?

 

[shushikiary]

Yea you're right, if you were just able to modify the value in there, but not know the base value, then you couldn't steal it. You'd have to take a data log and get the engine to move through the points in the table and reverse engineer the values from the log to fill out your table. Still possible to steal the tune, but much harder.

I still think blocking MHD from downloading bins and only doing MHD files and then using a private/public encryption with an MHD only editor would make it much harder to steel the tune.

There are still other download tools though that will download a bin (the bimmer *ahem* boost forum downloader for example... I forget its name).... But you'd have to piece together said bin by having the MHD modifying program and then do each cell by hand.

 

[Torgus]

NDAs? LOL

 

[JohnDaviz]

FWIW there are these RFP maps. These maps are good as base maps and everybody can adjust them. What most ppl do not understand is that just having a base map as a start doesn´t lead to being able to tune the car.

Anybody of you who want to tune the car on their own ever opened tunerpro and simply loaded a stock map with all the XDF files available?

I was lucky to pay a very well known phd to sell me an open base map and teach me one or two things. This is now two years ago and until this very day i am still learning on tuning my car. And still my go to thing is research research and more research before i go out and test a thing.
99% of the "i tune my car on my own" thing is not having a base map but understanding the tables you want to alter. Since the day i got the base map i went through roughly 300 revisions on my car. May be more. I have a huge folder of maps.

I took the V8Bait excel sheet and today it is 10 times the size with all the information i found or tested.

Let alone understanding PID. I am not the brightest candle on the cake and it took me quite a while to understand the PID tables with lots of revisions. For stock turbos it is pretty easy. But once you are on hybrids it will change the game.

Then you want to work out your timing tables so you don´t kill your engine. This took me... 250 Revisions until i figured what my car with the fuel available in germany is capable of. Then you have the question. Do i want timing for a small straight line race or tracking the car on the Nordschleife for example without killing the engine due to EGTs.

Then fueling....

Luckily i never had issues with stock Load 2 Torque tables on my DCT so i never needed to change them.

So here we have already about 10 or more tables where you have to research, study and test.

Do the research, take an original.bin or an RFP Map and you will be successful without buying a map under an NDA. Which is BS anyways for a BIN file.

You may not get where ppl got with extensive dyno days and testing. But getting your car run properly and sufficient. You simply need to DYOR.

 

[NoGuru]

I'm in sort of the same boat as JohnDaviz, I found a well reputable local Tuner and instead of buying his maps I paid him to teach me. He was gracious enough to accept.
Unfortunately we are heading into Winter and I won't even get to start tuning until spring.

For PID's I spent the last 5 years building racing drones and they work off PID's or else it would be more confusing to me. But what my tuner showed me is you can learn a lot just by poking around in TunerPro for some time.

 

[JohnDaviz]

Ah and i don´t want to forget. There is a guy here on this forum who tought me a shitton of stuff. Thank you! You know that i mean you

 

[shushikiary]

If you have any kind of engineering background PID's are pretty easy to understand. If you don't, then it could be rather confusing for sure.

National instrument gives a pretty good description: https://www.ni.com/en-us/innovations/white-papers/06/pid-theory-explained.html

Really though, playing with a PID is really the way to intuitively learn that the settings to. P gets you there faster but can make you oscillate. I gets you to your target over time when P isn't enough, and D prevents you from spiking all over the place (or can make you spike wildly if used too much).

Modifying vanos tables can also be confusing, there is an article flying around that explains how they did the timing for the VANOS system. Basically each valve has a bell shaped curve of how long in degrees it's open, the VANOS table decides where the maximum open point will be in crank degrees. Ah, I found the PDF: see attached file. Once you understand how the timings are measured for the valve timing in the tables, and you get that in spool you typically want lots of overlap for a turbo car, and then you want almost no overlap at high RPM (but this will vary depending on your turbo setup, for example a twin scroll setup will have very different vanos because the exhaust pulses no longer have to fight each other across banks for scavenging). So you can then figure out how to tweak your vanos for your system.

To me the hardest things were learning about how the boost offset request table is really a volumetric efficiency table, which is why its value then very much changes what the boost request is for a given load. The engine targets load which is really a charge air density in the cylinder, thus same charge air density, same fuel, same power. Thus they have to know the VE to calculate that, once they know that they can calculate how much boost is needed to hit target, then how much fuel, etc. From there you have the back end of the PID that controls WGDC to hit target boost, and you have the timing tables of course too. Then the fuel scalar tables are just a multiplier times the calculated fuel needed, and the AFR table is obviously in gas AFR which you have to convert to lambda for it to really make sense when dealing with E85.

Then you run into fun hidden things like the boost limit multiplier, and the old PSI limits that were hard coded into the code (which max boost gets around, etc). And then the need to get around the hard 23 psi limit by using a 2 point scaled higher bar TMAP.

A lot of work has gone into getting us where we are today on the N54 for sure. So yea it's a lot of your own time to go read and figure those things out too, there are not a ton of us out there who are willing to go learn it all. Personally it's just a hobby, the money I'd make tuning is a pittance compared to what I make doing my real job, so there's no incentive for me to try to jump into an already crowded TUNA market.

But I always tend to be the do it my self guy. Pay someone to fix my plumbing, dry wall, framing, or electrical... why would I do that? I do it my self. Pay someone to build an axle for my jeep? Why would I do that? I do it my self. Pay someone to weld? Why would I do that? So I do it my self.

 

[JohnDaviz]

May you please upload the vanos document please? You share a local computer folder

 

[shushikiary]

I edited the post with the attached file.

 

[JohnDaviz]

Do you also have the product info for n53/n54 vanos/cams?