Hacker News Reader

Comment by DIVx0 | Hacker News Reader

Besides locking your car into a garage, is there anything a VW owner can do to make it more difficult for these types of thefts to occur?

View on HN

You could always use a club: http://www.amazon.com/Club-1000-Original-Steering-Wheel/dp/B...

But anyone waiting to spend 30 minutes with an electronic crack is also smart enough to use liquid nitrogen to crack this too.

The difference is that a keyless hack can look natural since there is no physical force for entry or ignition. A funnel and chisel would raise some eyebrows.

This attack is against the RFID immobilizer for the engine, which means an attacker would have to break into the car, break the steering wheel lock and break the physical ignition lock prior to starting the car.

The full paper here: https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/sec15_supplement.... has a lot better detail.

No, it's also an attack on the actual wireless key which is used to open and start the car. It's just making the car "think" that the key is inside, so you just press the Start button and the car starts, after which you drive it away like normal.

Fair, but only on cars which have only passive security (that is - where you don't need to use the fob to unlock the car and you don't need to use a physical key to turn the ignition).

Which is of course the stock configuration on most modern luxury vehicles.

Most new cars which have keyless systems work exactly like that, nothing to do with luxury cars.

If the article is accurate, avoiding use of the key fob should make it more difficult for the attack to be carried out (which admittedly isn't very useful).

As far as my limited understanding goes using the the key fob for remote central locking does not expose any risk, instead its the immobiliser part, so manually opening your door with the physical key provides no extra safety, its when the key is present near the ignition barrel, thats where the immobiliser kicks in and where this venerability exists

From what I understand, they have to capture two uses of the key fob to be able to brute force, so if you don't use it then they can't capture anything. Or they just captured two uses from a random car and now it'll work on any car. I wish the article went into more detail.

The paper is right here: https://www.usenix.org/sites/default/files/sec15_supplement....

They captured 2 uses of the RFID-based immobilizer. That gets used every time you start the car, regardless of how you unlocked the car. It's completely separate from the UHF-based keyless entry system which you use to unlock the car.

The paper makes this distinction in the first paragraph, but of course the article fails to distinguish.

Ah okay, yeah I misunderstood what was happening here. Thanks for the info.

As bri3d has mentioned, I think you are confused because the key actually has three independent functions and you need to make the distinction between them all.

    - Remote central locking via UHF
    - Immobiliser authentication via RFID (this is what is vulnerable) 
    - Key for the ignition barrel or manual unlocking of doors

Reply on news.ycombinator.com