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Have You Seen This Segway?
Kringle writes "An April 28th theft of a Segway from a home in Kent, Washington appears to be the first of its kind. The Smoking Gun has a copy of the police report. The good news is that the thief didn't get the keys and is lugging around a big paperweight. No word yet from the Grand Theft Auto team about including a Segway in their next game release."
Couldn't bring yourself to read the article, huh?
From the article: "There's no way they can hot-wire it,'' said Valentine, a retired merchant marine officer."
He said the Segway can't be started without the key, which includes a computer chip.
ASCII tastes bad dude.
Binary it is then.
and yet, honda accords with thier electronic keys continue to be the number one stolen vehicle.
The Segway verifies that the key's code matches a code stored in the Segway, they are encoded with each code used once per million Segways, so the odds are really small that even your buddy's keys would activate another Segway. By the way, there are 3 keys, each activating a different max speed. (Source for all this: guy came to school to demo the Segway =D )
-insert a witty something-
Technically every home owners policy I've ever seen would cover this, at least to a certain dollar amount. It would cover your lawn mower sitting out back and it would cover your Segway joking secured with a bicycle chain.
A good atricle on the security of the Segway is located here.
i put together a guide on securing a segway ht, it's just like securing a bike (which i also have and need to secure). lots of common sense for the most part, also you can get a cheap insurance policy (under $150) for the ht against theft.
http://www.bookofseg.com/secure.html
cheers,
pt
His homeowner's policy wants his auto insurance to pay for it, his auto insurance wants his homeowner's to pay for it - Catch 22.
He's fed up with the whole thing, so he just wants to pay a $300 reward (no questions asked) for his Segway's return. He even said during the interview that the thieves just needs to tell him that they found it in the bushes.
Afaik, the Segway uses a version of the iButton which stores a small amount of other data in addition to the serial number. So, what the Segway probably does is check that the serial number matches what it expects, and also reads the data in the iButton to determine things like the maximum speed it's allowed to go. IIRC, at least one of the Segway keys is speed-limited, for "valet parking" etc.
So, to hotwire a Segway electronically (as opposed to somehow bypassing the electronic circuitry, if that's possible), you need to at least (a) determine what iButton serial number your Segway expects (hmm - wonder if it's printed on the Segway somewhere?) and (b) build a small iButton simulator which generates the required signal, using the documented OneWire protocol. However, you'd need to do some additional work to simulate the data storage on the iButton. You'd probably need to reverse engineer an existing Segway iButton key for that part - which should be easy, if you have access to a key.
Bottom line: hotwiring a Segway would take some work, and it would be tough without access to a Segway key to play with, but once you'd done one, it might be pretty easy to do the next one. A big question is how easy it would be to determine the serial number it expects, if you don't have the key. That could be a real barrier.
BTW, if you want a much more secure authentication mechanism, the Java version of the iButton will do public/private key encryption on the button, so it can be sent a challenge encrypted with your public key, and it will decrypt it with your private key and send it back to the challenger. Now that should be hard to hack.
If the makers were really clever, it may not be possible to make a matching key even if you tear apart the Segway. They may have designed it using a non-invertable cryptographic hash such that the code in the Segway can be derived from the code in the key, but not vice versa. In that case the only way to do it would be to rekey the Segway, but they could have made that very difficult.
See Hacking Segway Keys for more information. That's mostly about modifying a key to change the performance characteristics (increasing the speed limit), but it talks about the key code as well.