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Using Tire Pressure Sensors To Spy On Cars

Posted by kdawson on from the privacy-under-pressure dept.

AngryDad writes "Beginning last September, all vehicles sold in the US have been required to have Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) installed. An article up at HexView enumerates privacy issues introduced by TPMS, and some of them look pretty scary. Did you know that traffic sensors on highways can be adopted to read TPMS data and track individual vehicles? How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby? TPMS has been discussed in the past, but I haven't seen its privacy implications analyzed before. Fortunately the problem is easy to fix: encrypt TPMS data the way keyless entry systems do."

2 of 203 comments (clear)

  1. Re:RFID tracking by nguy · · Score: 5, Informative

    Using RFID combined with detectors at every street corner will allow for constant surveillance of every car all the time.

    So do license plate readers, and they can operate from greater distances and completely passively. Cost for a license plate reader is about the same as a good RFID reader, and they are probably at least as reliable. Furthermore, you are required to keep your license plate readable.

    Some cities are already starting to implement complete license plate-based tracking of vehicles.

  2. Re:RFID tracking by afaik_ianal · · Score: 5, Informative

    Of course, cars also come with this thing called a "license plate", which can also be tracked remotely and wirelessly.

    I don't know about "wirelessly" unless you are talking about people using their eyeballs. On Australian highways (In my state of New South Wales, at least), we have special cameras located on overpasses and things every couple of hundred kilometres or so. These most definitely detect where the number plates are in the image, cut them out, perform OCR, then record the ones that are on trucks. It's used to enforce the laws preventing truckers from driving too far without sleep, and constant speeding.

    These cameras have been around for over 10 years, and I assure you, are highly accurate.