JHU cryptographers crack “thiefproof” car key
By Tim Finin on Saturday, January 29th, 2005 at 10:14 am.
Anupam Joshi pointed out a good story on recent work by Avi Rubin and his students on cracking TI’s cryptographically enabled RFID tag widely used in anti-theft car locks, the ExxonMobil SpeedPass system and other RFID enabled applications. A draft of the paper is available online. Apparently the TI chips use a relatvely short key (40bit?).
Related posts: • Russian Government working to control the message on the Web;
Graduate Cryptographers Unlock Code of ‘Thiefproof’ Car Key
By JOHN SCHWARTZ, NYT, January 29, 2005BALTIMORE - Matthew Green starts his 2005 Ford Escape with a duplicate key he had made at Lowe’s. Nothing unusual about that, except that the automobile industry has spent millions of dollars to keep him from being able to do it.
Mr. Green, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, is part of a team that plans to announce on Jan. 29 that it has cracked the security behind “immobilizer” systems from Texas Instruments Inc. The systems reduce car theft, because vehicles will not start unless the system recognizes a tiny chip in the authorized key. They are used in millions of Fords, Toyotas and Nissans.
All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it. …
Cracking the system took the graduate students three months, Dr. Rubin said. “There was a lot of trial and error work with, every once in a while, a little ‘Aha!’ ” …
Mr. Sabetti of Texas Instruments argues that grabbing the code from a key would be very difficult, because the chips have a very short broadcast range. The greatest distance that his company’s engineers have managed in the laboratory is 12 inches, and then only with large antennas that require a power source.
Dr. Rubin acknowledged that his team had been able to read the keys just a few inches from a reader, but said many situations could put an attacker and a target in close proximity, including crowded elevators. …
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