Connecting To Unsecured Bluetooth Car Systems To Monitor Traffic Flow

New submitter TheTerseOne writes "The Columbian, the local newspaper of Vancouver (not BC), Washington (not DC) is reporting that local county traffic officials plan on spending $540k of government money to monitor traffic by connecting to vehicles' Bluetooth systems (whose owners/drivers have left them discoverable). The county claims that, although this sounds 'creepy' and 'like Big Brother,' there is no cause for concern. The specific brand of the system is not mentioned, but similar systems have already been the subject of security alerts." County officials note that they are stripping out part of the MAC, and the system is intentionally designed not to be useful for law enforcement to locate specific devices.

Comments

its an invitation for disaster.

[nimbius]

while many people will neither know nor care about the effort to smooth out traffic, Vancouver may be mistaken in their zeal. While my old 2001 crown victoria does not include bluetooth, the wireless laptop inside is programmed to dump millions of MAC's per second once a bluetooth connection is solicited, many of them malformed with negative integers, spaces and special characters...

Sometimes I collect the macs of vehicles in around me, and much like the towers of hanoi spoof them as i pass the readers on the highway to reduce traffic automagically shift the speed of traffic..

other times I collect the mac addresses of the scanners, and feed them to other scanners in a circular fashion.