Technology

I think that this kind of tech is just fundamentally insecure. I can't think of a way to secure it, at least not against gaining entry to the vehicle. And making it secure against driving away (by requiring it to continue to respond to changing cryptographic pings as you drive) opens the door to people being able to use jammers to disable your vehicle remotely. Maybe if they have a special Faraday cage place that you put your fob into, but at that point why not just use a key? Or just require a button press like the key fobs have for decades.

Oh and depending on the latency allowances for responding to pings, it might just be possible to leave a device in the vicinity of the key and relay it over the internet, so even that just increases the difficulty of defeating it a bit.

Same thing also applies to wireless keycards for secure entry, though I think the range for those is generally lower, so it would be more difficult to pull off.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

For at least a decade, a car theft trick known as a “relay attack” has been the modern equivalent of hot-wiring: a cheap and relatively easy technique to steal hundreds of models of vehicles.

But when one group of Chinese researchers actually checked whether it's still possible to perform relay attacks against the latest Tesla and a collection of other cars that support that next-gen radio protocol, they found that they're as stealable as ever.

In a video shared with WIRED, researchers at the Beijing-based automotive cybersecurity firm GoGoByte demonstrated that they could carry out a relay attack against the latest Tesla Model 3 despite its upgrade to an ultra-wideband keyless entry system, instantly unlocking it with less than a hundred dollars worth of radio equipment.

Instead, a hacker's device near the car has, in fact, relayed the signal from the owner's real key, which might be dozens or hundreds of feet away.

Or, as GoGoByte researcher Yuqiao Yang describes, the trick could even be carried out by the person behind you in line at a café where your car is parked outside.

“That's how fast it can happen, maybe just a couple seconds.” The attacks have become common enough that some car owners have taken to keeping their keys in Faraday bags that block radio signals—or in the freezer.

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