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Comment by gruez | Hacker News Reader

>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 is adding a whole new rube goldberg machine into your car really better than fixing the existing system?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immobiliser

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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 sleep mode when they have been inactive for a minute. Upmarket car manufacturers like Mercedes have started to add this. The only reason this is not yet widespread as increased car theft is good for car manufacturers.

Keyless cars top the list for most stolen cars across the UK, with around 93% of all stolen vehicles in 2020 being taken without vehicle keys. Addressing this stupidity would be the first step. It is like projecting your bank account details and security details on the facade of your building, and then being surprised your bank account is drained.

> What about a classical mechanical key?

can be picked

>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. Cryptographical signing won't help.

AFAIK the attack you describe only applies to keyless entry systems (ie. you can open and start a car without having to pull your key out), which is related but not the same as an immobilizer. Transponder keys without keyless entry systems still exist on today's models, and is the default on most cars unless you opt for an upgrade.

>However, this can be fixed by adding a motion sensor that makes key fobs go into a sleep mode when they have been inactive for a minute.

That helps against someone cloning your key while you're at your desk, but it seems way easier to clone the key while the driver is walking away from the car? That way you know which car to steal and don't have to follow the victim into the building, which might be secured (eg. office building with badge system). Measuring RTT time and/or trilateration (multiple antennas inside car) should be much more reliable.

Picking a laser cut key isn't trivial. Even picking a standard house lock isn't trivial, especially not in the dark.

They don't clone the key, they use an antenna to amplify the signal from your key fob and then drive off. In principle you can do this by following someone, but much safer to do this at 2am at night. Similar to a one time password, the signal is only valid for a short period of time.

Darkness doesn't have anything to do with anything. Once you get the tensioner and pick into the keyway you aren't using your eyes anymore, at that point it's all feel.

If you are that good a lock pick, you are better off as a locksmith. In real life the people send out to steal the car aren't the most talented and brightest, otherwise they would be running the operation safely from an office somewhere.

I spent maybe 2 hours with my first set of picks to unlock my first shitty masterlock padlock. An hour later I was through my front door deadbolt. It's not a hard skill to learn, especially when it comes to typical american door locks (pin tumbler). But this is all non-destructive. I used to keep a set of picks in my desk specifically to open up people personal rolling underdesk drawers/file cabinets, when they lost or forgot their keys.

My understanding that your average ignition is a little more complicated (or at least different .. wafer locks) circa 70s-90s and then they started adding radios and other things into the mix. I dunno, I've never tried to pick one of these.

Destructively bypassing your average old-school ignition is still something you can do blindly with a bent flathead screwdriver and some elbow grease in about 15 seconds flat. As is destructively bypassing any given door lock.. well not bypassing the lockper se, but instead the bolt/doorframe generally.

Bypassing the door locks is not as difficult as you think with the proper tools. See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vLy65ASXuEQ

Standard house locks don't require picking at all - you can bump them in a few seconds in any light conditions.

The fact that the LPL does it, with or without a special tool, doesn't really say much about how easy it is. He is an _extremely_ skilled lockpicker, and the vast majority of thieves, even those with some lockpicking skills/experience, are not going to be able to do what he does, as fast as he does it.

I have no idea how hard it is to do with that tool. I myself have as close to zero lockpicking skills as it's possible to have while still having picked a lock (I messed with a friends clear practice lock one time). But just seeing the LPL do it gives almost no indication of how hard it is to replicate what he is doing.

The modern versions of these keys cannot be cloned, they are challenge response. So you need to relay the challenge from the key, and then relay the response from the key back to the car.

This is often used by thiefs who bring the relay close to the front door, hoping for the keys to be in a bowl or a hook near the door. Then they can open and start the car using the relay. The car then won't turn off when it loses connection to the key (because that is dangerous) which allows stealing of the car.

There are cases where this was done over much larger distance, but those attacks are more easily defeated by having tighter tollerances on the latency of the reply. The latency tollerance does not do much for the 'keys near the front-door' attack, which is what the 'stationary keys do not reply' solution is aimed at.

> (because that is dangerous)

I've always wondered why the car doesn't warn the driver that there's 100 yards left before it will cut the engine (or limit it to idle), keep the power steering, turn on the hazards, and warn the driver that the vehicle won't continue to function because the key is not in range. Doesn't seem dangerous at all...

I dropped my wife off downtown in her car and she had the key in her purse. The car did make a weird beeping noise as I drove away, but I had no idea what it meant and I was pulling onto the highway which would have been a bad time for the car to stop driving on me.

That's still dangerous, and it doesn't matter how far out you warn the driver. The moment the car cuts to idle, the driver will lose some control. Imagine this happens while you're in less-than-ideal road conditions and you need to be able to accelerate. And there are a lot of reasons that the key might lose connection to the car other than the 'not present inside the car' case, like for example, the keyfobs battery running out, or the driver dropping their keys into some kind of shielded bag (my car for example has problems sensing the key when it's in an insulated shopping bag that I have).

I think at most you could do something like have the car go into 'limp home' mode if it senses the key was never present in the car for some amount of time after the car is started.

That's the wireless implementation.

I've had cars with chips, with contacts, in the mechanical keys [1].

Seems like one solution is to go back to the good old days of physical intent.

[1] One implementation: https://www.uhs-hardware.com/cdn/shop/products/df4ddf21436c4...

> The modern versions of these keys cannot be cloned

The persistent rumor, of course, is that this has been cracked for specific models from specific manufacturers, with the help of someone at the dealership, maybe someone who owes large amounts of drug or gambling money to local criminal syndicate types. "All" you'd need to do then is use a valid challenge response pairs off as a cryptographic oracle to brute force the challenge-response algorithm and recover the seed value computation algorithm for the key and the car. Then "all" you need to do is record a challenge-response pair from the real key talking to the vehicle, and maybe the VIN, in order to duplicate the key, in order to steal the vehicle.

If this has been been done, the algorithm and seed-value recovery technique have not been publicly shared over the Internet, so it's only a rumor that it's been done, but given how high-tech thieves are these days, I don't consider it outside the realm of possibility.

What isn't outside the realm of possibility is the Rolling-PWN attack, which can be done with a $32 device and has been demonstrated against 10 years of Honda vehicles, up to 2022.

https://rollingpwn.github.io/rolling-pwn/

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.

Doesn't the system already check the latency from key fob to car antenna? Better yet, you could use two antennas in the car, and triangulate the key fob.

The latency check is usually not sensitive enough to prevent a car being stolen from the drive-way from a relayed key that lies near the front door.

For reference 20 meters is about 66 nano-seconds.

Why not? A 2GHz is very attainable in modern CPUs and translates to 0.0005ns per cycle. This isn't theoretical either. 802.11mc[1] is a real standard and is accurate to 1-2m.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_802.11mc

Aren’t you off by three orders of magnitude? 2GHz translates to 0.5ns per cycle. Or perhaps you meant to write ms.

Whoops, you're right!

So, solvable?

UWB is augmenting Bluetooth for car keys solving this exact issue; The Car Connectivity Consortium came up with the Digital Key 3.0 standard that's available today, as implemented by some makes like BMW and the Hyundai/Kia group and Apple, and resists relay and replay attacks through precise ranging.

Why not put a button on the fob, like old car alarms had? Car won't start unless button is pressed on the fob, enabling the embedded radio.

Not great from an accessibility standpoint. For anyone with any sort of arthritis/rsi type issues, doing two things with the same hand at the same time is anywhere between tricky and impossible.

Consider how annoying the modern cigarette lighter is for a non-smoker.

> However, this can be fixed by adding a motion sensor that makes key fobs go into a sleep mode when they have been inactive for a minute.

Now I'm wondering how hard it would be for the thieves to shake the ground outside the house enough to fool the motion sensor...

Most thieves try to be quiet to avoid detection. However, one should be open minded to new technologies, and the use of a loud jackhammer on the drive way sound like an excellent solution to this problem.

This is two factor auth but when the "thing you own" is the standard case.

I don't get why it's not a keypad and relay though. Sounds like a complex solution to a fairly simple problem. I might be missing something though.

Edit - ah it's intended to work with many other options like controlling indicators or wipers or something - so you choose some pattern that is your password.

> it's intended to work with many other options like controlling indicators or wipers

I think you're asking exactly the right question though - how is all this not just a more complex, less secure, shittier version of a keypad that you enter a 4-6 digit code on?

It is also not any better than any other immobiliser. Unless it's on the CANBUS talking securely to the ECU, thieves will likely just bypass the module physically if they have the time.

This coupled with a CANBUS integration with the ECU to prevent it from starting would be pretty good though, since no one can wirelessly collect the signals to spoof the code.

> The only reason this is not yet widespread as increased car theft is good for car manufacturers.

Not if your brand is one of the ones known to be easy to steal. I doubt I’d buy a Hyundai in the future given my understanding of their reputation as easy targets.

Don't modern keyless fobs use something akin to TOTPs? A well kept clock can easily prevent relay attacks.

I don't think any of your typical car thieves are actually picking locks. For a traditional mechanical key ignition, generally they're going to break into the steering column and just hotwire the right connections together, or possibly jam a strong tool in the keyway and forcibly twist the cylinder depending on the design of the lock. Obviously that won't spoof a signal from a fob or other electronic signal, but it's why having a traditional mechanical lock on the ignition isn't really worthwhile. If the electronic communication is secure, a mechanical lock doesn't add value.

Maybe it's different for very high-end vehicle thieves, though.

> 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.

It seems relay theft could be 100% prevented by measuring the response time, and capping it to whatever is the equivalent of say 100 meters + processing time in key fob.

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?

> Remember the $445 million self driving pizza oven delivery van?

What I find hilarious about our industry is that this could be completely made up ... or not.

>Pizza robot truck startup Stellar snags $16.5M from Jay-Z

https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/Stellar-pizza-robot-truc...

>Stellar, which was founded by former SpaceX employees in 2019, uses a robot to cook mobile ordered pizzas which are then delivered by the truck driver.

That's nowhere near the $445M claimed though. Crunchbase lists them as having only having raised $25.5M. The $445M if real, must be the valuation.

https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/steller-pizza

edit: looks I'm looking at the wrong company, see replies for details

Also, the vehicles have a human driver rather than being self-driving.

The $445M figure is for another mobile pizza startup, Zume.

https://www.axios.com/2023/06/12/softbank-pizza-robot-shuts-...

Discussed last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36293636

whataboutism

Startup waste is generally funded from investors though. This seems like it might be funded by government grants which are funded by taxes.

Investors using 0% interest loans funded by taxpayers.

Are you referring to quantitative easing/ZIRP or specific government programs that give favorable loans to specific industries?

The Fed is the cause of QE/ZIRP, but it's not "funded by taxpayers" in any meaningful sense. The mechanism by which QE is done is that the fed prints money and uses it to buy government bonds and other assets, which pushes bond prices up, and consequently yields (and therefore interest rates) down. All of this doesn't cost the fed anything. The money is printed by them, after all. It's not like they're borrowing money from some other bank at 2%, and then distributing to the wider economy at 0%.

100% of the direct monetary cost of QE is borne by the American people.

And what is the mechanism by which the "direct monetary cost" arises, and is borne by the american people?

Inflation? Devaluation of the dollar? Debt? Current interest rates?

I’ve noticed 10-15 years of almost no innovation, but a ton of wealth transfer… but the FED still says ZIRP was a good idea.

> almost no innovation

The last 15 yrs in Biotech (esp genetics) and ML were more exciting than the previous 50.

Domino's has a near $14B market cap. Disrupting pizza delivery is a worthwhile venture!

If you could get that robot-cooks-as-you-drive idea right, even without the self-driving bit, you can out-compete Dominos by saving half the trips (back to store from delivery address).

The technology was immature but the fundamentals were there, and they'd save a not-insignificant amount of gas.

> they'd save a not-insignificant amount of gas

I wonder the efficiencies of cooking in a vehicle as opposed to a fixed pizza oven.

It all comes down to insulation I'd assume

It will necessarily be worse than the fixed oven.

That's easy. Put it on treads, and add a tree cutter/stripper, and a hopper, so that it can pick up all the fuel it needs to wood-fire the pizza off the side of the road before it goes to the next destination.

Vertical integration. Great idea. It could also have a grain mill so it can stop by some wheat fields and make its own flour.

Internal Cooking Engine.

I really can't imagine that. So you save some driver time. They're usually idle before delivery already, there's no driver shortage, and drivers/delivery isn't expensive. So there's only a small amount to undercut. For the profit to become interesting, you'd need a massive volume, but then you'd be forced to maintain a large fleet of mobile ovens. There's no automated driving, so you'd need drivers anyway. You'd have to pay everything from their idle return time, including the increased energy consumption.

Back-of-the-napkin says no.

The fact that Dominos practically begs people to come in and pick up their pizzas themselves undercuts your arguments about driver idle time. Maybe in your market they sit idle, but in mine I'd imagine they are spending 90%+ of their time fulfilling orders. My orders often spend 10min in the "Quality Check" state (waiting for a driver under a heat lamp).

Automated driving is orthogonal to the bake-as-you-drive model. Dominos will also switch to self-driving when they can.

The cost of owning 10 oven-vans vs 1 store + 10 regular cars will be the tough part and will require scale, but pizza is big business.

Arch that "quality check" thing bugs me to no end. It's the lie that bothers me: it's not like they're individually inspecting every single pepperoni or anything. They just don't have a driver available. Don't lie to me!

Wait... so the pizza would be delivered, fresh from the oven?? Is... do you know ... are they taking investors?

Yeah, that startup doesn't sound terrible to me. Like the other comments say, it's a multi-billion dollar industry. If you cook the pizza while you're driving it to the destination, then you change the time 15 minutes cooking + 15 minutes driving to just 15 minutes cooking and driving. Twice as fast.

But of course, you could offer the same latency by having a non-customizable menu and having pizzas ready to go when they're ordered. If it's 6:30PM on a Friday night, odds are someone wants the Pepperoni pizza that just came out of the oven. No fancy hardware required. The pizza is technically less fresh, but are minutes of freshness worth millions in VC? I don't know.

The "waste" in the startup industry has corrective mechanisms built in. Investors can pull their money out and take their business elsewhere.

Taxpayers cannot pull their money out of the NSF and reallocate it to a different government agency.

Sure. In theory, investors can behave as rational actors. In practice, you get all sorts of chasing the Next Big Thing because there’s too much money flowing around to too little fundamental research.

So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research. That’s like 5 developers for one year who would otherwise be allocated by the invisible hand into effectively useless endeavors like high frequency trading or ad tech.

Cut to the alternative universe where they’re working at Blackrock and a car thief is driving their car away.

> So I’m ok if we spend $1.2M on research.

I'm not. Where do I opt out of funding government grants?

At least I can decide not invest in something if I don't want to risk losing money.

You don't get to, because you don't get to opt out of the social benefit that they result in.

(remember that government spending basically created transistorized logic, microchips, and computer networking as we know them today. would you have opted out of those too?)

You can opt out here: https://www.irs.gov/individuals/international-taxpayers/expa...

Government funded research gave us computers, the internet, EUV technology, GPS, lasers, and all sorts of other shit.

If you're on HN in the first place, there is an approximately zero percent chance that the few dollars of your tax money spent on this kind of research hold a candle to the benefits you've gained from it.

You didn't lose any money. Nor did the country, the money didn't vanish, it ended up in employees pockets. Given they are probably low paid researchers, it'll all be back in the engine of capitalism by the end of the month. Some of it will even be back in the gov's coffers, where you can pretend it's doing something you prefer, like barely covering maintenance of a single road for a year.

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

How could one justify the other? Justifying waste by pointing to more waste is insane.

The more politics I see, the more its just grifting.

This would be nice to retrofit onto my old Honda, which has an easily exploited flaw in its rolling code system.

Modern cars also have new vulnerabilities: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

> This would be nice to retrofit onto my old Honda, which has an easily exploited flaw in its rolling code system.

There are aftermarket immobilizers systems as well, that also use cryptographically bound keys.

> Modern cars also have new vulnerabilities: https://www.wired.com/2015/07/hackers-remotely-kill-jeep-hig...

If car manufacturers can fuck up implementing today's immobilizer systems, what makes you think they won't fuck up implementing the rube goldberg contraption? Why do we have to switch to it just to get a non-broken cryptographic implementation?

Just like the one from TFA, mass production devices are easily defeated because they are all the same.

Wasn't there a rash of thefts of Kia and Hyundai cars recently?

Yeah, they’re targeted specially because they do not have immobilizes.

Because Kia tried to save money by removing said security systems from base models.

That was because the base model of those vehicles didn't have an immobilizer like every other car on the market as a cost cutting measure. They also have ignition switches that are relatively trivial to bypass.

It's possible that some other manufacturer may try it again in the future, but the hit to Hyundai/Kia's reputation has been substantial.

> ignition switches that are relatively trivial to bypass.

The switches themselves aren't bypassed. Their design for the lock cylinder is so crappy that it can be snapped off, exposing the peg that actuates the switch.

So let me get this straight

Modern cars have engines that are cryptographically ties to keys

But the Pentagon couldn’t put biometric locks on their humvees?

https://www.ibtimes.co.in/isis-takes-dozens-captured-us-humv...

They can’t account for trillions of dollars… but we vote them more money they didn’t even ask for

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/11/us/politics/trump-budget....

”Mr. Trump’s budget, the largest in federal history, includes a nearly 5 percent increase in military spending — which is more than the Pentagon had asked for“

Let me get this straight -- there is graft, waste, and incompetence in the defense industry??

The men in power always abuse that power, more or less.

We need oversight but politicians are not very interested in doing oversight because corporations use their money as free speech helping their favorite politicians get re-elected, because of the Supreme Court decision that allows that to happen.

So we need a more informed population to stop corruption from happening, but some politicians don't like the idea that people should be able to read whatever books they want.

That's probably true, but tangential to the absurd point made above.

There is almost zero reason to include robust locks or immobilizers on military vehicles. They're either occupied by soldiers with guns. Or in a locked facility, guarded by soldiers with guns. Or abandoned on the battlefield (in which case, they should be scuttled, but shit happens and sometimes you need to GTFO ASAP).

Locks are often intentionally omitted from equipment in environments where high availability is prioritized. They are also often omitted in locations where physical security is provided at a broader level.

Sure, let's intentionally omit locks from equipment that is designed not to fall into enemy hands. Let's not have a kill switch, either. Sure, makes sense for an agency with more money to spend than every corporation in America!

Yes, it does make sense that the DoD is more concerned about their own soldiers' lives than whether or not the Iraqi military has their vehicles stolen from them. These vehicles were already given away, adding some stupid biometric system would increase both the price of the vehicles and the number of lives lost due to failures. Throwing technology at problems is not always a solution. The vehicles typically have better security than a lock anyway, they're occupied or guarded by soldiers with guns.

You might be familiar with locks on vehicles due to your own experiences, but deterrence to unoccupied theft is a requirement that is somewhat unique to civilian passenger vehicles. It is completely normal for many other types of vehicles to have very minimal or zero theft mitigations due to operating in different conditions with different requirements. For example, multi-million dollar jets have no anti-theft systems at all.

> Throwing technology at problems is not always a solution

It's a fine solution to the very pressing "VCs aren't giving me money" problem. You can't have a blockchain or AI startup, say, without throwing technology at random things!

Even if you put the locks on, they would never be used. If you need it you need it right now, and it's usually life or death. If somebody is trying to steal it, you shoot them. The last thing you want to be doing in a gunfight is fucking with a lock.

This is a strawman

All you have to do is have every soldier who is authorized to use your equipment unlock the vehicle through an affirmative phrase — and the vehicle can check their voice for instance, or other biometrics like their fingerprint. Or each of them can wear a beacon or smartphone which does that.

Cars today open with you just getting into the car. This is easy stuff man

Solders in warzones frequently wear gloves, encounter debris, shoot guns, or are exposed to extremely noisy conditions, which would result in an inadequate signal-to-noise ratio for reliably and quickly sensing fingerprints and/or voices. They also tend to avoid unnecessarily emitting RF which would give away their position to enemy forces who have advanced signals intelligence gathering.

Yes, it would be possible to do what you are saying. However, militaries find this undesirable because they find the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.

Voice recognition under combat stress? That shit barely works under optimal conditions.

Not true, now it is very robust

When shrapnel and bullets are flying and your nerves are completely shot, your voice wavering and you're croaking from smoke inhalation, do you really want to entrust your life to voice recognition? Come on dude, you're being absurd. We're talking about military hardware, not tech gadgets for your home.

Or you're wearing your gas mask. Or it's cold so you're wearing a balaclava.

It doesn't matter how robust it is, any voice recognition less than 100% reliable and any more expensive than $0 would put your equipment at an operational disadvantage when put on the battlefield against an opposing military with vehicles that exhibit a 0% rate of authentication failures because they lack authentication.

There is no realistic scenario in which a military has lost physical control of the vehicle, and the situation is mitigated by locks on the vehicle. It is always already too late at that point.

I'm saying what everyone else is trying to tell you 'you have no fucking idea what you are talking about, you are trying to solve a problem that does not need to be solved, that no one has a desire to solve and is in fact not even a problem'.

Can you point me to an example of such a system?

every soldier who is authorized to use your equipment

You do realize that in a war zone, that list of authorized users can change rapidly (as people are injured, die, or rotated out of combat)?

“This is easy stuff man”

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that electronics are perfect, and never fail for any reason (including but not limited to battery drain, battery overcharging, battery age, heat, cold, sudden change between heat and cold, vibration, shock, moisture, dryness, flooding, corrosion, UV degradation, rodent infiltration, wind, wind containing abrasives such as sand and dirt, chemical exposure, fire smoke exposure, fire heat exposure, sabotage due to local exploits, sabotage due to remote exploits, etc.).

Ignoring all those possibilities, you are only left with the problem of key management. You can find an overview of those challenges at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_management

Managing secrets at a scale beyond people you know personally is extremely difficult to do correctly.

> You can find an overview of those challenges at https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Key_management

Not a big deal when physical security is provided at the broader level. For example, for any failed access attempt just fall back to TOFU.

(Sorry, I'm just 85% sure the top-level ancestor is trolling and I wanted to help by taking it one level deeper. :)

Does not sound like you have ever been anywhere near a combat situation.

You don't know who is going to need to be able to drive something at the drop of a hat. And the more fiddly and complicated something gets, the more likely it is to fail because of either technological or UX/human reasons in stressful situations. This would cost lives.

> Sure, let's intentionally omit locks from equipment that is designed not to fall into enemy hands.

Slow down there with the sarcasm and think about the actual requirements or use-cases first. Your average operable military vehicle is in one of three situations:

1. Actively occupied or guarded from theft by current owners/operators with guns who will not tolerate strangers getting close.

2. Parked somewhere in the middle of a whole bunch of people who are generally guarding the whole area, and those people may need to be able to operate it very quickly.

3. In some long-term storage which is well-fenced, under surveillance, guarded by people with guns, and typically very far from both overt enemies and opportunistic thieves.

So there's already an access control system tuned to a particular set of needs... and one of those needs includes "using it to escape from something dangerous even if the prior-driver and everything in their pockets got vaporized."

How many tanks and materiel did Ukrainians take from the Russians? On October 2022 it was an estimated 453 Russian tanks. I guess 1, 2, 3 don't work that well in battle

https://www.newsweek.com/how-russian-tanks-captured-ukraine-...

Also for other things too:

https://nypost.com/2023/05/11/ukrainians-strike-russians-wit...

Are you suggesting that locks would have prevented this?

Certainly kill switches would

Every TV show has a self destruct mechanism to prevent a ship from falling into enemy hands and blabla etc

An opposing military capable of leading the Russian military to abandon their tanks would also have the capability of defeating a kill switch once they have unhindered physical access to it.

Scuttling has been a common military practice, for literally millennia. This practice is unrelated to the presence of any locks on the vehicle. Militaries are equipped with explosives and weapons and can perform these actions without them being built into the vehicle. The reason this did not happen is not due to the construction of their vehicles, it is because they did not take action to do so. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scuttling

The automated self-destruct countdowns you have seen in movies and TV shows are used for dramatic effect. In reality, it is cheaper, more reliable, and safer to scuttle a manned vehicle manually.

So... you're basing your opinion about machines used by soldiers in combat.... on fictional television shows?

Just a question, have you ever worked with soldiers before?

Forget the suspensefully-narrated self destruct sequences, why has the Pentagon not invested in plot armour for every soldier? Make sure the uniforms aren't red and they can only die near series finales.

So what? None of that wall-spaghetti supports an argument for keyed ignition locks as the solution. It's not like those Russian troops had just stepped away to get coffee.

If anything, it suggests other things like:

1. Russia shouldn't have tried a desperate blitzkreig through muddy terrain.

2. The Russian military should have had better policies/equipment to destroy or scuttle the ofabandoned tanks.

3. Russian tank-drivers should have had better training so that they didn't get their vehicles stuck in embarrassing ways.

Plus it's not like the opposing force will be a bunch of joyriding delinquents: Even if you completely remove your abandoned truck's steering-wheel and pedals, your way out, they've got mechanics and tools and factories, they can just fit their own. Truly denying them any valuable salvage is actually a lot of work/damage.

No fucking key is going to stop them from finding that tank in a field, towing it back to a farm behind friendly lines, and bypassing the fucking lock using a fucking hammer or a soldering iron.

My guy, I believe the enemy already knows about our WWII-era "large truck" technology. It's fine.

You don't want either of those things in a widely used military vehicle. Soldiers do not need to die because they're fumbling and dropping keys under fire. They also don't need their truck dying in the middle of a maneuver because the kill switch accidentally went off.

Also, in war, trucks will be getting destroyed left and right. It'll literally be a rounding error.

If the enemy gets physical access to the vehicle that you're going to use to escape, you're already toasted.

And on the other hand, if you are ambushed, you don't want you and your unit to die because the soldier who had the keys just got fragged by the enemy and now you can't escape.

What a nightmare that would be: wearing gloves, fast entry and exit, injury/swapping drivers, sand.

Also those were Humvees taken from Iraqi personnel.

Or: "Our unit was ambushed while setting up camp. We could all have escaped alive in our truck, if not for the fact that the first of us killed by the enemy was Private Jeane, and she was the one with the keys."

Even if you put this device in a car or a biometric device in a car or even a normal keyed system. An enemy who has possession of that car for more than a few hours can easily bypass most locking devices.

This one is nothing more than a relay on the battery line. Simply find the relay and bridge it. Problem solved. Might take you a few hours to dig under the dash to find the damn thing, but once you do 'problem fucking solved'.

But the Pentagon couldn’t put biometric locks on their humvees?

The tanks that were stolen belonged to the Iraqi armed forces, not the US Army.

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