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A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

news.umich.edu

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Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#251

Post by s1artibartfast »

fnimick wrote: post #43
screamingninja wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly. What's even worse is that it takes a huge research grant to come up with this. > With a new $1.2 million dollar grant from the National Science Foundation...

That amount of money is absolutely nothing compared to the waste that goes on in the startup industry. Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van?

People get irate about government spending here's a big difference between someone wasting your money and someone wasting their own money.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#253

Post by spell-slinger »

K0balt wrote: post #169
memetomancer wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a frustrating yet common sort of take. Yes, this is simple, as the article clearly points out. Yes it is obvious in retrospect. But did you do anything with your brilliant work besides bodge your terrible car a few more miles down the road? There is value to developing the entire system... to ensuring the keypad mechanism is reasonably robust and tamper proof. There is value to understanding the vehicle as a…

No, really, good for them. But don’t be talking down on my car. That’s just not cool. That beast is the workhorse of the farm and it gets the job done. None of the windows roll down though and it’s hot as hell inside, so it discourages unnecessary use, saving the planet. It rarely sees pavement but it drags what needs to be dragged and it pulls the utility rigs out after they deliver to us.

He sounds like a monster of a vehicle. Loyal and strong. The goodest of cars.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#254

Post by ModernMech »

DanHulton wrote: post #191
K0balt wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, really, good for them. But don’t be talking down on my car. That’s just not cool. That beast is the workhorse of the farm and it gets the job done. None of the windows roll down though and it’s hot as hell inside, so it discourages unnecessary use, saving the planet. It rarely sees pavement but it drags what needs to be dragged and it pulls the utility rigs out after they deliver to us.

And that's all well and good, but maybe introspect here for a second? You're upset that your accomplishments aren't being respected, immediately after discounting the accomplishments of others. The point is that your car's modifications and the university's are similar, but different, particularly in scale and broad robustness, which adds difficulty in ways you may not be appreciating. $1.2 million may sound like a l…

$1.2 million will fund 4 years of research for 2 professors, and 2 PhD students. It’s not exactly a career making grant.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#255

Post by Waterluvian »

titanomachy wrote: post #96
Waterluvian wrote: post #14

I knew someone with a shitty pickup truck where he wired a light switch into the fuel pump and hid it under the steering column. The truck would be stolen something like 5 times a year and every time he would find it abandoned a km or so away when the gas in the line ran out. I drove in it once to get lunch and near the beginning the car begins sputtering and he's like, "oh right, you're thirsty" and reached under an…

> The truck would be stolen something like 5 times a year Damn, I thought I lived in a bad part of town.

Mind you it didn’t have doors that locked and you started it by twisting a screwdriver.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#256

Post by HWR_14 »

samstave wrote: post #193
chriskanan wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here is the link to the award (I think): https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2245223&His... Probably half the award is taken up by indirect costs at the university, leaving the remainder for a few PhD students to be funded, money for the devices, and any studies where they are probably paying participants to use the device. $1.2M doesn't go that far in terms of grants. As far as whether this is a good in…

Curious, what % of costs of a grant are usually consumed by the UNi - are these to pay for equipment, power, lab time, etc? Or are they slurping funds for other aspects of the uni's operations?

Usually about half. It's designed to cover the costs of running a university research program spread across all the projects. So a 10MM project provides 10x the funding that a 1MM project provides. Think things like health insurance for the researchers, covering time between projects, lab capital costs, electricity, administration, accounting, even the cost of writing grants.

There's a valid question of if that number can be smaller, but the general concept makes sense.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#257

Post by Spivak »

oxfordmale wrote: post #82

What about an old fashioned mechanical key? Car manufacturers are directly to blame for the increased theft of cars. It is a win win for them, as it results in higher car sales. If a dood manufacturer would sell doors that can be easily opened, everyone would complain. Far less so with cars.

It wouldn't stop anything. You have a car that has everything it needs to start and go just sitting there. Whether you have a physical key, password, retina scanner, you name it the issue is that the thief has physical access. For physical security they can just short some wires to make the car think it has the key, and for digital systems they gain access to the cleartext internal message bus of the car and tell it to start. The latter is the one that has more promise on making it actually secure because you can make the software required to drive the car and the car physically can't move without it but that comes with a lot of usability and performance trade-offs.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#258

Post by IshKebab »

oxfordmale wrote: post #103
gruez wrote: post #16

>At the end of the three-year project, the team aims to have a commercially viable prototype that can be scaled up to commercial production, first as a theft deterrent device, and potentially later as a complete vehicle entry and control system that could replace traditional keys and fobs. What's the point of this? Modern cars already have engines that are cryptographically tied to keys[1]. They're not perfect, but i…

What about a classical mechanical key? I am referring to a laser cut key, the type that can't be easily lock picked, other than in Hollywood movies. The problem is relay theft, where thief's relay the signal of your fob key inside the house to the car via a simple antenna and amplifier system. Cryptographically signing won't help. However, this can be fixed by adding a motion sensor that makes key fobs go into a slee…

I don't know if that completely solves it. People keep keys in pockets.

The full fix is time of flight measurement but as I understand it that's still beyond cheap electronics.

Or just.. you know press a button when you want to unlock your car.

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#259

Post by cdchn »

memetomancer wrote: post #143
K0balt wrote: post #84

1.2 million grant for this? Now I’ve seen grift, but come on. I want to hire their grant writer. Literally a relay in the starter lead. This looks like one of my afternoon projects, and I’m not even joking. I have a 1990s montero diesel and it leaks power, and I often forget to disconnect the terminal. So I bought a relay from AliExpress (same one shown in this photo but one size up) and hooked it up with an esp32 an…

This is a frustrating yet common sort of take. Yes, this is simple, as the article clearly points out. Yes it is obvious in retrospect. But did you do anything with your brilliant work besides bodge your terrible car a few more miles down the road? There is value to developing the entire system... to ensuring the keypad mechanism is reasonably robust and tamper proof. There is value to understanding the vehicle as a…

This is the same kind of take as going to a nice restaurant and loudly exclaiming "$50 for a steak?! I could pay $8 at the butcher and make the same thing at home!"

Re: A surprisingly simple way to foil car thieves

#260

Post by soligern »

K0balt wrote: post #84

1.2 million grant for this? Now I’ve seen grift, but come on. I want to hire their grant writer. Literally a relay in the starter lead. This looks like one of my afternoon projects, and I’m not even joking. I have a 1990s montero diesel and it leaks power, and I often forget to disconnect the terminal. So I bought a relay from AliExpress (same one shown in this photo but one size up) and hooked it up with an esp32 an…

That’s what people said about Dropbox too. I can set this up in 5 mins with rsync blah blah. There is value and effort involved in making it production ready, seamless, general population ready etc.
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