Remote Vulnerabilities in Automobiles
This group has found a ton of remote vulnerabilities in all sorts of automobiles.
It’s enough to make you want to buy a car that is not Internet-connected. Unfortunately, that seems to be impossible.
Entries Tagged "cars"
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Sirius XM Software Vulnerability
This is new:
Newly revealed research shows that a number of major car brands, including Honda, Nissan, Infiniti, and Acura, were affected by a previously undisclosed security bug that would have allowed a savvy hacker to hijack vehicles and steal user data. According to researchers, the bug was in the car’s Sirius XM telematics infrastructure and would have allowed a hacker to remotely locate a vehicle, unlock and start it, flash the lights, honk the horn, pop the trunk, and access sensitive customer info like the owner’s name, phone number, address, and vehicle details.
Cars are just computers with four wheels and an engine. It’s no surprise that the software is vulnerable, and that everything is connected.
Hacking Automobile Keyless Entry Systems
Suspected members of a European car-theft ring have been arrested:
The criminals targeted vehicles with keyless entry and start systems, exploiting the technology to get into the car and drive away.
As a result of a coordinated action carried out on 10 October in the three countries involved, 31 suspects were arrested. A total of 22 locations were searched, and over EUR 1 098 500 in criminal assets seized.
The criminals targeted keyless vehicles from two French car manufacturers. A fraudulent tool—marketed as an automotive diagnostic solution, was used to replace the original software of the vehicles, allowing the doors to be opened and the ignition to be started without the actual key fob.
Among those arrested feature the software developers, its resellers and the car thieves who used this tool to steal vehicles.
The article doesn’t say how the hacking tool got installed into cars. Were there crooked auto mechanics, dealers, or something else?
Digital License Plates
California just legalized digital license plates, which seems like a solution without a problem.
The Rplate can reportedly function in extreme temperatures, has some customization features, and is managed via Bluetooth using a smartphone app. Rplates are also equipped with an LTE antenna, which can be used to push updates, change the plate if the vehicle is reported stolen or lost, and notify vehicle owners if their car may have been stolen.
Perhaps most importantly to the average car owner, Reviver said Rplate owners can renew their registration online through the Reviver mobile app.
That’s it?
Right now, an Rplate for a personal vehicle (the battery version) runs to $19.95 a month for 48 months, which will total $975.60 if kept for the full term. If opting to pay a year at a time, the price is $215.40 a year for the same four-year period, totaling $861.60. Wired plates for commercial vehicles run $24.95 for 48 months, and $275.40 if paid yearly.
That’s a lot to pay for the luxury of not having to find an envelope and stamp.
Plus, the privacy risks:
Privacy risks are an obvious concern when thinking about strapping an always-connected digital device to a car, but the California law has taken steps that may address some of those concerns.
“The bill would generally prohibit an alternative device [i.e. digital plate] from being equipped with GPS or other vehicle location tracking capability,” California’s legislative digest said of the new law. Commercial fleets are exempt from the rule, unsurprisingly.
More important are the security risks. Do we think for a minute that your digital license plate is secure from denial-of-service attacks, or number swapping attacks, or whatever new attacks will be dreamt up? Seems like a piece of stamped metal is the most secure option.
Relay Attack against Teslas
Nice work:
Radio relay attacks are technically complicated to execute, but conceptually easy to understand: attackers simply extend the range of your existing key using what is essentially a high-tech walkie-talkie. One thief stands near you while you’re in the grocery store, intercepting your key’s transmitted signal with a radio transceiver. Another stands near your car, with another transceiver, taking the signal from their friend and passing it on to the car. Since the car and the key can now talk, through the thieves’ range extenders, the car has no reason to suspect the key isn’t inside—and fires right up.
But Tesla’s credit card keys, like many digital keys stored in cell phones, don’t work via radio. Instead, they rely on a different protocol called Near Field Communication or NFC. Those keys had previously been seen as more secure, since their range is so limited and their handshakes with cars are more complex.
Now, researchers seem to have cracked the code. By reverse-engineering the communications between a Tesla Model Y and its credit card key, they were able to properly execute a range-extending relay attack against the crossover. While this specific use case focuses on Tesla, it’s a proof of concept—NFC handshakes can, and eventually will, be reverse-engineered.
Hyundai Uses Example Keys for Encryption System
This is a dumb crypto mistake I had not previously encountered:
A developer says it was possible to run their own software on the car infotainment hardware after discovering the vehicle’s manufacturer had secured its system using keys that were not only publicly known but had been lifted from programming examples.
[…]
“Turns out the [AES] encryption key in that script is the first AES 128-bit CBC example key listed in the NIST document SP800-38A [PDF]”.
[…]
Luck held out, in a way. “Greenluigi1” found within the firmware image the RSA public key used by the updater, and searched online for a portion of that key. The search results pointed to a common public key that shows up in online tutorials like “RSA Encryption & Decryption Example with OpenSSL in C.“
EDITED TO ADD (8/23): Slashdot post.
Surveillance of Your Car
TheMarkup has an extensive analysis of connected vehicle data and the companies that are collecting it.
The Markup has identified 37 companies that are part of the rapidly growing connected vehicle data industry that seeks to monetize such data in an environment with few regulations governing its sale or use.
While many of these companies stress they are using aggregated or anonymized data, the unique nature of location and movement data increases the potential for violations of user privacy.
Security Vulnerabilities in Honda’s Keyless Entry System
Honda vehicles from 2021 to 2022 are vulnerable to this attack:
On Thursday, a security researcher who goes by Kevin2600 published a technical report and videos on a vulnerability that he claims allows anyone armed with a simple hardware device to steal the code to unlock Honda vehicles. Kevin2600, who works for cybersecurity firm Star-V Lab, dubbed the attack RollingPWN.
[…]
In a phone call, Kevin2600 explained that the attack relies on a weakness that allows someone using a software defined radio—such as HackRF—to capture the code that the car owner uses to open the car, and then replay it so that the hacker can open the car as well. In some cases, he said, the attack can be performed from 30 meters (approximately 98 feet) away.
In the videos, Kevin2600 and his colleagues show how the attack works by unlocking different models of Honda cars with a device connected to a laptop.
The Honda models that Kevin2600 and his colleagues tested the attack on use a so-called rolling code mechanism, which means that—in theory—every time the car owner uses the keyfob, it sends a different code to open it. This should make it impossible to capture the code and use it again. But the researchers found that there is a flaw that allows them to roll back the codes and reuse old codes to open the car, Kevin2600 said.
Hacking Tesla’s Remote Key Cards
Interesting vulnerability in Tesla’s NFC key cards:
Martin Herfurt, a security researcher in Austria, quickly noticed something odd about the new feature: Not only did it allow the car to automatically start within 130 seconds of being unlocked with the NFC card, but it also put the car in a state to accept entirely new keys—with no authentication required and zero indication given by the in-car display.
“The authorization given in the 130-second interval is too general… [it’s] not only for drive,” Herfurt said in an online interview. “This timer has been introduced by Tesla…in order to make the use of the NFC card as a primary means of using the car more convenient. What should happen is that the car can be started and driven without the user having to use the key card a second time. The problem: within the 130-second period, not only the driving of the car is authorized, but also the [enrolling] of a new key.”
Forging Australian Driver’s Licenses
The New South Wales digital driver’s license has multiple implementation flaws that allow for easy forgeries.
This file is encrypted using AES-256-CBC encryption combined with Base64 encoding.
A 4-digit application PIN (which gets set during the initial onboarding when a user first instals the application) is the encryption password used to protect or encrypt the licence data.
The problem here is that an attacker who has access to the encrypted licence data (whether that be through accessing a phone backup, direct access to the device or remote compromise) could easily brute-force this 4-digit PIN by using a script that would try all 10,000 combinations….
[…]
The second design flaw that is favourable for attackers is that the Digital Driver Licence data is never validated against the back-end authority which is the Service NSW API/database.
This means that the application has no native method to validate the Digital Driver Licence data that exists on the phone and thus cannot perform further actions such as warn users when this data has been modified.
As the Digital Licence is stored on the client’s device, validation should take place to ensure the local copy of the data actually matches the Digital Driver’s Licence data that was originally downloaded from the Service NSW API.
As this verification does not take place, an attacker is able to display the edited data on the Service NSW application without any preventative factors.
There’s a lot more in the blog post.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.