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Insurance Company Dongles Don't Offer Much Assurance Against Hacking
According to a story at Forbes, Digital Bond Labs hacker Corey Thuen has some news that should make you think twice about saving a few bucks on insurance by adding a company-supplied car-tracking OBD2 dongle:
It’s long been theorised that [Progressive Insurance's Snapshot and other] such usage-based insurance dongles, which are permeating the market apace, would be a viable attack vector. Thuen says
he’s now proven those hypotheses; previous attacks via dongles either didn’t name the OBD2 devices or focused on another kind of technology, namely Zubie, which tracks the performance of vehicles for maintenance and safety purposes. ... He started by extracting the firmware from the dongle, reverse engineering it and determining how to exploit it. It emerged the Snapshot technology, manufactured by Xirgo Technologies, was completely lacking in the security department, Thuen said. “The firmware running on the dongle is minimal and insecure. It does no validation or signing of firmware updates, no secure boot, no cellular authentication, no secure communications or encryption, no data execution prevention or attack mitigation technologies basically it uses no security technologies whatsoever.”
I've long thought there could be a really lucrative market for OBD2 spoofers. Instead of plugging the dongle directly into your car, plug it into a middle-man that feeds it the "happiest" possible data to make it think your driving is perfect. There is no authentication in the OBD2 protocol so there is no way for the dongle to tell the difference between a real OBD2 data feed and a spoofed one.
The most obvious reason for an attack here is to commit insurance fraud. At present, an insurance company is forced to base an insurance premium on all the meta-data they can possibly gather about the prospective client, excepting their sex if they are in the EU (although this may well lead to a quite astonishing number of men called "Sue", if insurance companies attempt to bypass this and link first names to insurance risk).
A data-gathering dongle would seem to offer a much better deal, allowing the company to charge more if the user indulges in risky behaviour of some description.
A possible reason for hacking into the module would therefore be to falsify the data sent back to the company; a boy racer who regularly breaks speed limits, corners absurdly fast and brakes late if at all would gain substantially from a fraudulent data recording which portrayed him as someone with the driving habits of an octogenarian grandmother; such a person might also think that the gamble of sending such phoney data was well worth the savings when set against the fairly low risk of getting caught.
It therefore worries me that companies are this lazy when building such equipment. It really doesn't take all that much to keep out the majority of crackers right from the start, and as the skilled ones are in the minority, taking a little care initially would pay dividends down the line.
No need to do such extreme damage, when the same effect can be achieved with a simple fuse on the positive voltage line of the port. Suspicious activity? Burn the fuse-- BAM-- port is dead, but easily fixed.
However, this would require a "smart" component inside the dash, between the actual ignition control system/ACS system, and the ODBII port interface. Such a device would need to have a reference pattern to check current communications against, and would need some level of processing capacity to compare realtime engine diagnostic data and bus activity against the reference. (Does not need to be fancy here, but this does imply the ability to program a new reference pattern later, especially if the system is fully adaptive to changing engine conditions over time.)
This then places some significant implementation considerations on the vehicle manufacturer-- this device has to somehow be able to be field-reset at a dealership if it gets confused after having the engine serviced, and also needs to have nothing but read-only access to the engine's control system. The only thing it should have "write" access to should be the fuse. (And maybe an indicator lamp)
However, given the less than spectacular implementations of integrated devices in modern vehicles (in terms of security, and security oriented design/implementation) I question if such a device would be properly implemented.
I get the sneaky suspicion that the automaker would be ... "tempted" ... by dealerships and other retailers in the market to integrate lojack functionalty into the security device, thus making it itself into the target of exploits. (Otherwise, the purposeful activation of the intrusion failsafe would render actual lojacks incapable of stopping cars, by disabling the communication bus. This means removing the fuse would essentially disable such countermeasures.) This would then make "remove the dongle" no longer an option.
When presented with a choice between "properly implemented security" and "Pressure from their customers" (Auto manufacturers RARELY, if ever, sell directly to the public. THEIR customers are the dealerships.) , I expect automakers will choose to placate their customers every single time.