Honestly, everytime I hear about the latest new-and-shiny that car manufacturers try to put in new cars (such as stop-start, keyless ignition) I can't help but roll my eyes at the inevitable fail that this is going to bring. Sure these knick-knacks might look cool now, but what happens eight years down the line, when your electric system goes belly up in middle of the highway or at a traffic signal?
VW is one of the worst offenders in this regard. They are quick to implement useless features without giving any regard to reliability or the idea of graceful failure. The greatest achievement of VW marketing has been in perpetuating the myth about the infallibility of German Engineering. German cars seem to have some of the worst electrical problems which is at least in part due to all the electric and electronic equipment they cram into their cars. I would put greater confidence in the reliability of Japanese or even Korean engineering over them (although even the usually conservative Japs have been tempted to follow these fads of late). One less button on the dash of your bland Toyota, means one less thing that is going to break five years down the line.
VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
131–140 of 226 posts
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#132I have a Passat from late 2013 -- it cannot be remotely started but doors are keyless. Twice in the last 16 months, somebody rummaged through it overnight, without breaking anything. We religiously close the car every night, especially after the first occurrence, but still it happened again. After it happened to my next-door neighbor's 2013 Golf as well, I reported it to VW and they never even bothered getting back t…
Your anecdote doesn't share anything in common with the article. One of two things are likely - your car wasn't actually locked this nights, or the theirs used a signal amplifier to make the car think your keys inside the house were next to your car. Neither of those things is VW's fault - if you don't like the wireless automatic door unlocking because the signal can be boosted maliciously, then you should disable it…
No, my anecdote is more about a data point (well, three actually) indicating we don't really know how many ways there are to break into these cars, and that manufacturers are playing dumb, hence me not being surprised at the news that another one was found.
If really the problem was relatively trivial, VW should have warned me on how to avoid it, and they didn't. It can't be a simple amplifier: it's not just proximity, you actually have to press a button on the dongle to open a door, so whatever they were doing, it wasn't just repeating an existing signal; and as I said, I can tell you that making sure the car is locked has become a nightly ritual.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#133Earlier quoted context omitted.
What I want to know is why the car will continue to accept 100 trial keys per second after the first 100,000 attempts failed. Shouldn’t there be some kind of exponential back-off after failures? If after the first 1000 failed keys it would only accept e.g. one new try every few seconds, it would then take 2–3 orders of magnitude more time to brute force.
What if the car was parked in a handicapped spot near entrance of a football stadium? It could conceivably receive enough incorrect RFID signals to trigger a back-off.
I don't think a high traffic spot could ever cause an issue with this, unless each person tried to start your car. I believe this is referring to the immobilizer chip in the key that allows turning the key to start the engine. Incidentally, this is probably the chip that means that if you lose your key, you can't just get a new one cut, you need to get a new chip too.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#134Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's not serious. It still requires someone to specifically target you & your car with special gear and know-how far outside the realm of the typical car thief. It wouldn't fill me with warm and fuzzies if I were sold a high-end door lock / alarm system / safe that was only exploitable with 'special gear and know-how far outside the realm of the typical thief.'
>It wouldn't fill me with warm and fuzzies if I were sold a high-end door lock / alarm system / safe that was only exploitable with 'special gear and know-how far outside the realm of the typical thief.' Then you'd better never buy a high-end door lock / alarm system / safe, they all have that in common.
I'm not familiar with the current state of physical security exploitation, but I get the sense that it would take more than 30 minutes and pushing the button on a black box someone built for me to compromise. Unlike this.
The issue with electronic exploitation is that the know-how component is relatively trivially automated. Script kiddies, etc.
If I bought an $80k Porche, I'd be bit miffed that it could be stolen from a parking lot in the time it took me to have a sit-down lunch.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#135Earlier quoted context omitted.
The attack vectors available for use against a corporation is infinitely larger than those available for a car. It's not really a fair comparison.
Not only that - but the 'duh' moment for me was the 96bit key size.
Worse, the paper says the cipher has only 56 bits of internal state (made me think of DES, but that isn't at play here)
Even worse, they get it down to 48 bits.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#136Earlier quoted context omitted.
I doubt you'd say that if you owned one of the affected VWs.
One might, if one had purchased a VW during the years this paper was censored.
Exactly. So how many vulnerable cars are on the roads of the world right now because the UK High Court wanted to "protect consumers". It seems insane. A temporary injunction, sure. But two years (actually three since the original vulnerability report) isn't remotely acceptable.
And getting back to the original point: I'd want to see some coverage of how this disaster happened in the UK courts.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Theft of newer-model cars is extremely rare and I don't think vulnerabilities will change that much. Anything that requires computers at all is going to be beyond the average car thief. If you're worried about safety, buy a car with a good crash safety rating. You're far more likely to get into a normal crash due to bad human drivers or mechanical failures than you are to be hacked. If you're worried about the financ…
You're making the mistake of assuming car thiefs are unintelligent or unorganized. Successful thefts that return a profit require a network of skilled people to pull off and talent can be found within that pool or recruited. By saying a thief would have to understand how a computer exploit works, it's saying a thief needed the equivalence of an engineering degree to drive away with a car before computers entered the…
I'm basing it off the observation that newer cars are essentially never stolen, while popular older cars are stolen in vast numbers.
Whatever the reason, stealing newer cars is harder. That increased difficulty translates into decreased theft rates.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your anecdote doesn't share anything in common with the article. One of two things are likely - your car wasn't actually locked this nights, or the theirs used a signal amplifier to make the car think your keys inside the house were next to your car. Neither of those things is VW's fault - if you don't like the wireless automatic door unlocking because the signal can be boosted maliciously, then you should disable it…
It doesn't share much in common with the article, but I believe this immediately because the same thing happened three times over the last two years with different people in my street. All with new and rather nice Audi models. Opened without any damage, the dashboard completely rampaged (nav, radio, airbags etc removed) I won't be surprised if there's another, even more serious vulnerability in Volkswagen locks. The…
A long time ago I heard an anecdote where some guy got locked out of his luxury BMW and called for help. A roadside assistance repairman showed up and knocked on the car in a certain spot with a certain pattern and the car unlocked. Don't know if it's true or not but it wouldn't surprise me if there were (hopefully more secure than that) undocumented backdoors on the modern models.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#139Honestly, everytime I hear about the latest new-and-shiny that car manufacturers try to put in new cars (such as stop-start, keyless ignition) I can't help but roll my eyes at the inevitable fail that this is going to bring. Sure these knick-knacks might look cool now, but what happens eight years down the line, when your electric system goes belly up in middle of the highway or at a traffic signal? VW is one of the…
I don't think start/stop belongs in your list of useless knick-knacks that are prone to failure -- the Prius has been in production for about 18 years, and it's used start/stop from the beginning to save fuel. But you don't hear of large numbers of Priuses stuck at red lights when their engine computer forgot how to start the engine.
Start-stop can save significant fuel - 3% - 12% by some estimates, and it comes at very little cost and complexity.
Re: VW Has Spent Two Years Trying to Hide a Big Security Flaw
#140Earlier quoted context omitted.
96 bits by itself probably isn't within reach of brute forcing - I assume the algorithm itself had flaws.
What I want to know is why the car will continue to accept 100 trial keys per second after the first 100,000 attempts failed. Shouldn’t there be some kind of exponential back-off after failures? If after the first 1000 failed keys it would only accept e.g. one new try every few seconds, it would then take 2–3 orders of magnitude more time to brute force.
It doesn't: according to the paper, when someone turns the ignition key, they car will generate about 20 challenges to the key fob, and if the fob does not successfully authenticate any of them, the car will give up and not start.
The attack works by overhearing the exchange between the car and the key fob, and then doing an somewhat brute-force analysis to calculate what the secret key on the fob must have been.