Slashdot Mirror
Mobil SpeedPass, Various Car RFID Car Keys Cracked
44BSD writes "Crypto-enabled RFID products, including Mobil SpeedPass and various car keys, have been defeated utterly by Avi Rubin, et. al. Details are at rfidanalysis.org. An academic paper is also available."
Car RFID Security System Cracked
.com ads story was set to run. I had a ready made "Duper Bowl" joke, too.
The best part of subscribing to Slashdot is watching CmdrTaco post multiple duplicates in a row, then giving up and posting a dupe anyway. Before this story, a dupe of the Super Bowl
Hey Taco, when's the last time you read your own site? Oh wait, why am I asking, you'll never see this.
And the NY Times story from yesterday's slashdot story on this same crack by the same team.
The electronic keys from Mercedes are a good example of this done right. The key has an IR transceiver at it's head that exchanges one time codes with the car when the driver begins turning it. The received code is saved for next time and can't be intercepted without getting physically between the head of the key and the transceiver inside the lock. Even then, an intercepted code would have to be used before the victim returned to his car. Who is going to do a complicated install of capture equipment into a fortified lock at location A and then follow the victim to location B to steal the car? It's just far too conspicuous.
Mercedes overhauled security, rather than tacking on a secure by being obscure layer to the existing crackable standard - TI Immobilizer systems don't require advanced physical access, just proximity to the key at least an hour before the moment of a heist. Even worse, once the key is cracked it won't change either, so criminals can wait to strike and further avoid notice. Just wait till a tiny RFID scanner and a usable cracking program show up in the black market. A laid off engineer has too much potential to make dough with the ideas that have been released. The program could even do distributed processing on a broadcast LAN or via P2P.
Now someone is probably going to point out that they'll be laughing when the fancy Mercedes key runs out of batteries and leaves its owner stranded, but this isn't the case. The key can receive power from the car despite not having any visible metal contacts - likely because there is a coil embedded in the plastic key that will get power inductively when the key is inserted - without any wires [slashdot.org]. It's news on slashdot, but it's been shipping since 1997, and much longer before that for other applications.
As if that weren't it, the key doubles as an RF remote for locking/unlocking doors, popping the trunk, and a panic function. But wait there's more - the IR transciever portion of the key, when aimed at the driver door can open, close, or place anywhere in between all the side windows and sunroof at once. Great for getting into the car on a hot day or sealing up all the windows as you leave. Impressive what they they've put usably into a key, albeit oversized.
Finally, despite using a radically different model, Mercedes cleverly applied the familiar form and usage pattern of the existing standard to bridge it with the new one - a nice touch for user comfort without any compromise to security. Well engineered indeed.
... is that they reverse-engineered the design of the cipher using just black-box access!
Reverse-engineering can be easy enough when you have some assembly code or a piece of hardware, but these guys figured out the internals just by looking at input/output pairs. (OK, they had a rough description of the design, but it was lacking almost all details and was even inaccurate in places.)
That's really clever -- and really underscores the idea that "security through obscurity" tends to fail terribly. (TI probably thought that the use of a proprietary cipher provided a lot of security, so they didn't worry so much about key length. Foolish, but common, reasoning.)
I think Mobil anticipated this. They started requiring you to enter your ZIP code at the pump a few months back.
--- Ban humanity.
I own a 2002 Toyota, which I bought used, and which came with ONE transponder key.
Toyota wanted $45 for the blank. And $95 to "program the key for the car". My brother has a Mitsubishi, they wanted even more.
It turns out that if you can obtain a blank, you can usually program your car yourself to accept the key.
And it turns out that there is a very nice market for these key blanks on ebay. Search for transponder key and your vehicle's make and model. The going rate is about $20.00 and the key blanks usually come with all the instructions you need.
I bought two blanks for $40, and three days and 20 minutes later I had three working keys for my Toyota saving me over $200 from what the dealer wanted.
Your biometric information is not secret. The police or your parents might have a copy of your fingerprints, for example. It's theoretically difficult to duplicate biometric data, but certainly not impossible: Cryptome has a copy of the research paper where researchers used $20 worth of common kitchen items to successfully fool every commercial fingerprint reader on the market.
Assuming forgery is tougher than that, the problem really is in the "interface" -- at some point the information stops being "biometric" and has been converted by circuitry into digital data. Digital data, of course, can be sniffed, copied, and modified. That's the real weak point of the biometric systems. If you can replace real biometric data with spoofed data, the computer systems downstream aren't going to know the difference.
John
As the other poster says, the brake light won't be on. Furthermore, if you did short out the brake light, and it *was* on, all you'd do is pop the brake light fuse, which may not affect the alarm.