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Using Tire Pressure Sensors To Spy On Cars
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."
Especially this part:
How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby?
Great, first I have to worry about the tolls on I-44 through Oklahoma, now I got to worry about exploding vehicles?
Maybe in the future we can all roll to work in giant hamster balls. Getting groceries home will be a bitch tho...
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Tires already come with RFID tags, which can also be read and tracked remotely. Cars probably also emit all sorts of other unique signals that can be recognized and tracked.
Of course, cars also come with this thing called a "license plate", which can also be tracked remotely and wirelessly.
Basically, if you drive, you can be tracked.
The government won't use this information to track you down to that seedy little motel on the side of route 9, where you cavort with no less than 3 women other than your wife. We only care about catching bad guys. Your wife however...
If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.
I'm having trouble grasping the concepts, can someone put it into a nice analogy using cars? What... wait... damnit.
The solution is even easier than encryption. Just don't broadcast a unique identifier!
... making me wonder if this is just an elaborate 4/1 hoax.
In this case there's no reason for each tire pressure sensor to be broadcasting one. All they need to do is chirp back the pressure inside the tire. That's it. Give them enough power to hit a receiver located in the wheel (which might be 4-6" away in a very large tire, probably a lot closer than that, and it's all inside the steel-belted tire) and call it a day. Unless you are playing Ben Hur, you're not going to get close enough to another car's tires for it to become a problem -- use a high frequency and you're going to get a substantial bit of attenuation via the tire itself, and then you're decreasing as the square of the distance through free space. You're never going to have more than one valve-stem sensor per wheel-mounted receiver, so why bother with it?
If you really do need a weak form of identification, rather than hardcoding a UID, it would be pretty trivial to have each sensor randomly choose a number from a range such that the chance of collisions was low (deriving the randomness from resistor noise or by oversampling whatever analog sensor they use to determine pressure) and reset periodically or each time the car is started. That eliminates the problem of having to coordinate UIDs and prevent duplicates (cf. the cheap Bluetooth transceivers that caused problems because their MAC-ish addresses were all zeros). Every unit can be completely identical.
On further consideration, I can't really imagine why the designers of the TPMS would have given each sensor a UID (especially since it would probably cause confusion when you rotate tires, if the car's computer tracks them)
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I'm glad to see that there's other right-minded folk like me on here! Keep up the good work Mr. Transporter!
I know 1 person with on star, and they were in a bad accident, having the OnStar saved her life.
Clearly OnStar causes accidents.
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