High-end racing bikes are now vulnerable to hacking | Hacker News Reader

High-end racing bikes are now vulnerable to hacking

theverge.com

15 pointsrntn18 comments

I'd never really thought about this before, but if there's a will there's a way.

You could definitely see teams or fans using devices to try and prevent riders from winning particular races. Preventing gear shifting or even downshifting a rider, but you'd think they would just prevent them from shifting gears altogether as that would be the safest.

If this does happen, I'd expect teams might opt for bring back electronic shifting but with cables, or they may go down the route of trying to add a level of security to the wireless comms.

Imagine the Olympic games where a fan prevent a rider from winning.

Luckily in the world of cycling there are only a around 2-3 major manufacturers of electronic shifting, therefore the effort to resolve this would be fairly concentrated.

The ability to hack your shifters and change their gears is only one vulnerability class though.

If you could receive an instantaneous signal exactly as your rivals changed gears, it could allow you to anticipate and cover their attacks ("Everybody on the rival team just shifted up, get ready!"). Or infer when they're getting tired. This read-only vulnerability already exists with wireless speedometers, power meters, cadence sensors, heart rate monitors etc. - spying but not interfering.

With all those devices x 180 riders in close quarters, the RF environment inside a pro peleton has got to be wild. I'm amazed there aren't more problems from straight signal interference.

You don’t have to hack that. The sound of chains shifting is both audible and visual.

There’s a pretty distinctive smacking sound that happens when chains find their new home. Particularly, on downshifts when the move to a small physical gear ring results in a brief reduction of tension before it snaps back to tension.

I did this in college! We used replay attacks to shift SRAM AXS Force groupsets without having to know any other information. A really fun project

Yet my fixie remains unhackable

The hack turns them into fixies.

Extremely pedantic difference but not quite. They'd still be able to coast which makes it single speed. Being able to freewheel or not is the difference between a single speed and a fixed.

Much worse. If you can make the radio controlled servo to throw the chain during sprints this could cause a specific rider to crash.

Just why? What's the added value of having it wireless?

You don't have to maintain the shifting cables that actuate the derailleur or run them through the frame. Decoupling the shifting force and mechanism from the actual physical actuation of the shifter also means your can have an extremely consistent and smooth shift.

They mean why is it wireless not why is it electric shifting

Yeah I know. It's nice not have to run cables through the frame.

Bikes are easier to maintain, less cable routing throughout the bike and the wireless component allows you to wirelessly adjust the gearing on your mobile phone.

A problem for what, ~500 people max worldwide? High end, competitive cycling where sabotage is likely isn't a big group.

These have been in flagship consumer models for years now, and gradually drifting down into more mid-high level road bikes. Still talking about the $2k+ range but totally normal in the kind of bike your dentist or, frankly on HN, your coworkers, ride.

Di2 is also commonly used in consumer grade electric cargo bicycles, used by a lot of people every day to take their kids to school and back. You don't want your gears to fail while doing that.

I would imagine the sporting body would be concerned that any crowd member with a flipper zero could remotely shift gears on a racer's bike and possibly render it immobile.

Sounds like it is in the rider's own interest to not have a wireless bike.

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