Police have been stumped by videos of cars being stolen with little more than a mystery electronic device. Plenty of evidence suggests that sort of digitally enabled car theft is already occurring.
“No good cryptographer today would propose such a scheme,” Garcia says. With that collection of rolling codes as a starting point, the researchers found that flaws in the HiTag2 scheme would allow them to break the code in as little as one minute. (To speed up the process, they suggest that their radio equipment could be programmed to jam the driver’s key fob repeatedly, so that he or she would repeatedly press the button, allowing the attacker to quickly record multiple codes.) Instead, a hacker would have to use a radio setup similar to the one used in the Volkswagen hack to intercept eight of the codes from the driver’s key fob, which in modern vehicles includes one rolling code number that changes unpredictably with every button press. For that attack they didn’t need to extract any keys from a car’s internal components. The second technique that the researchers plan to reveal at Usenix attacks a cryptographic scheme called HiTag2, which is decades old but still used in millions of vehicles. The second attack affects millions more vehicles, including Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Fiat, Ford, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Opel, and Peugeot.
One of the attacks would allow resourceful thieves to wirelessly unlock practically every vehicle the Volkswagen group has sold for the last two decades, including makes like Audi and Škoda. Later this week at the Usenix security conference in Austin, a team of researchers from the University of Birmingham and the German engineering firm Kasper & Oswald plan to reveal two distinct vulnerabilities they say affect the keyless entry systems of an estimated nearly 100 million cars. And this time, they say, the flaw applies to practically every car Volkswagen has sold since 1995. But that experience doesn’t seem to have deterred Garcia and his colleagues from probing more of VW’s flaws: Now, a year after that hack was finally publicized, Garcia and a new team of researchers are back with another paper that shows how Volkswagen left not only its ignition vulnerable but the keyless entry system that unlocks the vehicle’s doors, too. In 2013, when University of Birmingham computer scientist Flavio Garcia and a team of researchers were preparing to reveal a vulnerability that allowed them to start the ignition of millions of Volkswagen cars and drive them off without a key, they were hit with a lawsuit that delayed the publication of their research for two years.
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