A New Wireless Hack Can Unlock 100 Million Volkswagens

In 2013, when University of Birmingham computer scientist Flavio Garcia and a team of researchers were preparing to reveal a vulnerability that allowed them to start the ignition of millions of Volkswagen cars and drive them off without a key, they were hit with a lawsuit that delayed the publication of their research for two years. But that experience doesn’t seem to have deterred Garcia and his colleagues from probing more of VW’s flaws: Now, a year after that hack was finally publicized, Garcia and a new team of researchers are back with another paper that shows how Volkswagen left not only its ignition vulnerable but the keyless entry system that unlocks the vehicle’s doors, too. And this time, they say, the flaw applies to practically every car Volkswagen has sold since 1995.

Later this week at the Usenix security conference in Austin, a team of researchers from the University of Birmingham and the German engineering firm Kasper & Oswald plan to reveal two distinct vulnerabilities they say affect the keyless entry systems of an estimated nearly 100 million cars. One of the attacks would allow resourceful thieves to wirelessly unlock practically every vehicle the Volkswagen group has sold for the last two decades, including makes like Audi and Škoda. The second attack affects millions more vehicles, including Alfa Romeo, Citroen, Fiat, Ford, Mitsubishi, Nissan, Opel, and Peugeot.

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The $40 Arduino radio device the researchers used to intercept codes from vehicles’ key fobs.

Both attacks use a cheap, easily available piece of radio hardware to intercept signals from a victim’s key fob, then employ those signals to clone the key. The attacks, the researchers say, can be performed with a software defined radio connected to a laptop, or in a cheaper and stealthier package, an Arduino board with an attached radio receiver that can be purchased for $40. “The cost of the hardware is small, and the design is trivial,” says Garcia. “You can really build something that functions exactly like the original remote.”

100 Million Vehicles, 4 Secret Keys

Of the two attacks, the one that affects Volkswagen is arguably more troubling, if only because it offers drivers no warning at all that their security has been compromised, and requires intercepting only a single button press. The researchers found that with some “tedious reverse engineering” of one component inside a Volkswagen’s internal network, they were able to extract a single cryptographic key value shared among millions of Volkswagen vehicles. By then using their radio hardware to intercept another value that’s unique to the target vehicle and included in the signal sent every time a driver presses the key fob’s buttons, they can combine the two supposedly secret numbers to clone the key fob and access to the car. “You only need to eavesdrop once,” says Birmingham researcher David Oswald. “From that point on you can make a clone of the original remote control that locks and unlocks a vehicle as many times as you want.”

The attack isn’t exactly simple to pull off: Radio eavesdropping, the researchers say, requires that the thief’s interception equipment be located within about 300 feet of the target vehicle. And while the shared key that’s also necessary for the theft can be extracted from one of a Volkswagen’s internal components, that shared key value isn’t quite universal; there are several different keys for different years and models of Volkswagen vehicles, and they’re stored in different internal components.

The researchers aren’t revealing which components they extracted the keys from to avoid tipping off potential car hackers. But they warn that if sophisticated reverse engineers are able to find and publicize those shared keys, each one could leave tens of millions of vehicles vulnerable. Just the four most common ones are used in close to all the 100 million Volkswagen vehicles sold in the past twenty years. They say that only the most recent VW Golf 7 model and others that share its locking system have been designed to use unique keys and are thus immune to the attack.

Cracked in 60 Seconds

The second technique that the researchers plan to reveal at Usenix attacks a cryptographic scheme called HiTag2, which is decades old but still used in millions of vehicles. For that attack they didn’t need to extract any keys from a car’s internal components. Instead, a hacker would have to use a radio setup similar to the one used in the Volkswagen hack to intercept eight of the codes from the driver’s key fob, which in modern vehicles includes one rolling code number that changes unpredictably with every button press. (To speed up the process, they suggest that their radio equipment could be programmed to jam the driver’s key fob repeatedly, so that he or she would repeatedly press the button, allowing the attacker to quickly record multiple codes.)

With that collection of rolling codes as a starting point, the researchers found that flaws in the HiTag2 scheme would allow them to break the code in as little as one minute. “No good cryptographer today would propose such a scheme,” Garcia says.

Volkswagen didn’t immediately respond to WIRED’s request for comment, but the researchers write in their paper that VW acknowledged the vulnerabilities they found. NXP, the semiconductor company that sells chips using the vulnerable HiTag2 crypto system to carmakers, says that it’s been recommending customers upgrade to newer schemes for years. “[HiTag2] is a legacy security algorithm, introduced 18 years ago,” writes NXP spokesperson Joon Knapen. “Since 2009 it has been gradually replaced by more advanced algorithms. Our customers are aware, as NXP has been recommending not to use HT2 for new projects and design-ins for years.”

While the researchers’ two attacks both focus on merely unlocking cars rather than stealing them, Garcia points out that they might be combined with techniques like the one he and different teams revealed at the Usenix conferences in 2012 and last year. That research exposed vulnerabilities in the HiTag2 and Megamos “immobilizer” systems that prevent cars from being driven without a key, and would allow millions of Volkswagens and other vehicles ranging from Audis to Cadillacs to Porsches to be driven by thieves, provided they could get access to the inside of the vehicle.

Black Boxes and Mysterious Thefts

Plenty of evidence suggests that sort of digitally enabled car theft is already occurring. Police have been stumped by videos of cars being stolen with little more than a mystery electronic device. In one case earlier this month thieves in Texas stole more than 30 Jeeps using a laptop, seemingly connected to the vehicle’s internal network via a port on its dashboard. “I’ve personally received inquiries from police officers,” says Garcia, who added they had footage of thieves using a “black box” to break into cars and drive them away. “This was partly our motivation to look into it.”

For car companies, a fix for the problem they’ve uncovered won’t be easy, Garcia and Oswald contend. “These vehicles have a very slow software development cycle,” says Garcia. “They’re not able to respond very quickly with new designs.”

Until then, they suggest that car owners with affected vehicles—the full list is included in the researchers’ paper (see below)—simply avoid leaving any valuables in their car. “A vehicle is not a safebox,” says Oswald. Careful drivers, they add, should even consider giving up on their wireless key fobs altogether and instead open and lock their car doors the old-fashioned, mechanical way.

But really, they point out, their research should signal to automakers that all of their systems need more security scrutiny, lest the same sort of vulnerabilities apply to more critical driving systems. “It’s a bit worrying to see security techniques from the 1990s used in new vehicles,” says Garcia. “If we want to have secure, autonomous, interconnected vehicles, that has to change.”

Here’s the researchers’ full paper:

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Augmented Reality Could Speed Up Construction Projects

Employees at Gilbane Building Company, a commercial construction firm based in Rhode Island, usually work off paper blueprints or with digital models that they view on computers or iPads. But Gilbane senior manager John Myers now gets a closer look by putting Microsoft’s augmented-reality computer, HoloLens, on his head.

When Myers recently put on HoloLens to look at a mockup of a project, he could see that steel frames the company planned to order to support the building’s walls were too long to fit the design. Having spotted the issue ahead of time, the company can now ask the supplier to cut the frames shorter in his shop rather than make workers adjust dozens of tracks that would hold the frames in place. Myers estimates that the move will save Gilbane about $5,000 in labor costs.

Construction is one of the least automated industries around, and it will be for a long time. But augmented reality might begin to change that. Tools like HoloLens, which places holographic images in its user’s physical environment, could help this $10 trillion business increase efficiency so that fewer projects run over budget and behind schedule. Gilbane is one of many early testers of the technology. The engineering firm AECOM, the design and architecture firm Gensler, and the China State Construction Engineering Corporation have also announced they are experimenting with HoloLens.

Gilbane’s John Myers uses HoloLens to review a virtual 3-D model of Boston’s Dearborn STEM Academy.

Gilbane says the $3,000 HoloLens, which it received in mid-June, has already shown its value. It was while viewing life-size 3-D models of Dearborn STEM Academy, a $70 million, 120,000-square-foot school Gilbane is constructing in Boston, that Myers spotted the frame-length issue. “That one catch paid for the HoloLens,” he says.

Gilbane vice president Sue Klawans says HoloLens could also be used before a building is constructed to detect flaws in the way ducts and pipes are laid out in office ceilings—a complicated process that often takes up more room than anticipated—and in building designs that feature glass “curtain” walls, which sometimes require more than 10 different contractors to fabricate.

I tried Gilbane’s HoloLens at the Dearborn STEM Academy site. After strapping on and adjusting the headset (which required another person’s assistance), I pinched my fingers in the air to move a 3-D image of the school’s mechanical room from its virtual perch on a table to the floor. Then I tapped a button on a virtual control panel to increase the model’s size to 100 percent. That let me walk inside it and look at details of the construction as if it were actually built. Using a virtual control panel, I could also toggle different views on and off to see either a simple architectural image of the room, a more detailed structural image, or one that just showed its mechanical, electrical, and plumbing systems.

All the features I tried were easy to navigate and seemed useful. But the HoloLens image stuttered at times, and the life-size model didn’t quite look like a real room, partly because the headset’s lenses don’t cover your peripheral view.

Amar Hanspal, a senior vice president at the software company Autodesk, which supplies the building visualization data necessary for the system to work, says that eventually, builders could wear HoloLens at construction sites “and see in real time, ‘Here’s what the building should be and here’s what it actually looks like.’”

First, though, builders have to figure out how to wear HoloLens along with their safety gear and keep it from being a dangerous distraction. HoloLens wraps around the middle part of your head, like a bulky pair of goggles, which makes it difficult to wear a hard hat at the same time. Another problem: its lenses aren’t as rugged as construction safety glasses, which are typically heat-resistant and shatter-proof. There’s also a possibility that the holographic images could divert your attention and cause you to take a wrong step—a potentially fatal move on a multistory construction site. For now, Gilbane employees are mostly using HoloLens inside a mobile office trailer parked on the side of the school construction site.

Reviewing construction models via HoloLens would be more useful if people could make notes directly on the 3-D images they were viewing. Trimble, a technology company that sells the popular 3-D modeling software SketchUp, lets people do that in its HoloLens app. Users can mark problem areas on SketchUp building models with circular virtual icons and record short audio clips explaining why they highlighted particular spots. Eventually, they might be able to use their hands to move an element within a virtual mockup and immediately see how the change affected the design, says Aviad Almagor, who leads Trimble’s HoloLens business.

“We’re going to want to see HoloLens improve [as a construction aid],” says Klawans, the Gilbane executive. “But it’s a leap over what we were doing before. It’s not just a new toy.”

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How Humans Could Go Interstellar, Without Warp Drive

alpha-beta

Alpha, Beta and Proxima Centauri (circled). (Credit: CC BY-SA 3.0)

The field equations of Einstein’s General Relativity theory say that faster-than-light (FTL) travel is possible, so a handful of researchers are working to see whether a Star Trek-style warp drive, or perhaps a kind of artificial wormhole, could be created through our technology.

But even if shown feasible tomorrow, it’s possible that designs for an FTL system could be as far ahead of a functional starship as Leonardo da Vinci’s 16th century drawings of flying machines were ahead of the Wright Flyer of 1903. But this need not be a showstopper against human interstellar flight in the next century or two. Short of FTL travel, there are technologies in the works that could enable human expeditions to planets orbiting some of the nearest stars.

Picking the Target

Certainly, feasibility of such missions will depend on geopolitical-economic factors. But it also will depend on the distance to nearest Earth-like exoplanet. Located roughly 4.37 light years away, Alpha Centauri is the Sun’s closest neighbor; thus science fiction, including Star Trek, has envisioned it as humanity’s first interstellar destination.

In 2012, a planet was identified orbiting closely around Alpha Centauri B, one of three stars comprising the Alpha Centauri system. Three years later, astronomers were unable to find that same planet, but if it exists it would be too hot for life anyway. What we really want to know is whether planets exist further out from the two main stars, or whether their much smaller, dimmer companion star, Proxima Centauri, located just 4.24 light years from Earth, has planets of its own.

Very soon, these questions will be answered by the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) that NASA will be launching into space in 2018, and by other instruments that will follow, instruments capable of more than merely detecting a planet’s presence. They will also be able to read the chemical composition of planetary atmospheres.

JWST

An artist’s rendering of the James Webb Space Telescope. (Credit: Northrup Gruman)

Imagine this: If there’s an Earth-like planet around Alpha Centauri or another nearby star system, astronomers will know about it within a decade or two—certainly long before we can build a ship like the Enterprise.

Maybe we could consider flying under the speed of light.

Propulsion

It is not widely known, but the US government spent real money, tested hardware and employed some of the best minds in late 1950s and early 60s to develop an idea called nuclear pulse propulsion.

Known as Project Orion, the work was classified because the principle was that your engine shoots a series of “nuclear pulse units”—atomic bombs of roughly Hiroshima/Nagasaki power—out the back. Each unit explodes and the shockwave delivers concussive force to an immense, steel pusher plate, which is connected to the most immense shock absorber system that you could imagine.

orion-propulsion

An Orion propulsion schematic. (Credit: NASA)

The researchers calculated that the ship could reach five percent the speed of light (0.05 c), resulting in roughly a 90-year travel time to Alpha Centauri. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which forbade nuclear explosions in the atmosphere, and the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which forbade nuclear explosive devices in space, effectively ended Orion.

In his epic TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan noted such an engine would be an excellent way to dispose of humanity’s nuclear bombs, but that it would have to be activated far from Earth. But back when Orion was being funded, amazingly, the plan was to use the nuclear pulse engine even for launching the vessel, in one massive piece, from the surface of Earth. Suffice it to say it does not seem likely that we’ll every build a nuclear pulse ship, but it’s something that we already have the technology to build.

A Cleaner System 

But what about a less explosive, cleaner propulsion system that could achieve the same end? The British Interplanetary Society took on this goal in the 1970s with Project Daedalus. Named for the inventor from Greek mythology who built wings to escape the island of Crete, the design was based on projected development of inertial confinement fusion (ICF), one of two main strategies for generating nuclear fusion energy on Earth.

The other strategy is magnetic confinement fusion (MCF), and similar to ICF, designs exist for adapting MCF to space propulsion. Like Orion, a Daedalus craft would have to be rather large. But using deuterium and helium-3 (obtained from the lunar surface, or from Jupiter’s atmosphere) as fuel, Daedalus craft could reach 0.12 c, cutting travel time to Alpha Centauri to something like 40 years.

There are other ingenious ideas, such as the Bussard ramjet that could approach the speed of light, but the size of the engines and technological gaps that we must fill become so large that they may not seem easier than warp drive. So let’s limit our discussion to capabilities up to the neighborhood of the 0.12 c of Daedalus as we consider what form a human interstellar voyage might take

The Generation Starship

It has been said that if you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. This proverb characterizes the strategy of building an interstellar ship so large that you don’t worry so much about the travel time.

Effectively, the ship is a space colony. It contains a large population—current estimates are that a minimum of tens of thousands of colonists are needed for a healthy gene pool—and all that is needed for people to live comfortably, but it follows a trajectory out of the solar system. Ideas for an interstellar ark taking millennia to reach a destination date back to the fathers of the Space Age—Russia’s Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and America’s Robert Goddard—but the idea really set sail with mid 20th century science fiction writers.

In a two-part novel series written in 1941, Robert A. Heinlein wrote of a vessel that took so long to reach its destination that the people aboard had forgotten they were on a ship. Instead, they believed the large craft to be their natural world.

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An artist’s concept of a toroidal space colony that could accommodate 10,000 people. (Credit: NASA)

Sending colonists on a voyage lasting centuries or millennia raises social questions, such as whether it is ethical to commit unborn generations to live out their lives in transit between planets.

10,000 years is a rather long time and means a large number of generations to commit to the interstellar void. But if we’re talking 40 or even 90 years, that’s probably more palatable to many more people. Still, it raises questions as to who would volunteer for such an expedition.

But what about people with shorter attention spans and what if we have no will to build enormous, moving colonies? 

Egg Ships

Here’s another science fiction strategy: sending cryopreserved human embryos, or gametes (ova and sperm) into deep space. Upon reaching the destination star system, the embryos would be developed. This would require an artificial uterus, which we don’t have yet, but like fusion, here we’re also talking in terms of a matter of decades.

At some point in this century, motherless birth could become a technological reality. Theoretically, we’ll be able to send cryopreserved embryos through space, for centuries if needed due to propulsion limitations, and set them to develop into full-term infants on the new planet.

artificial-womb

An artist’s conception of an artificial womb system. (Credit: Genetic Literacy Project)

Then, all you need are robot nannies to raise and educate the infant colonists. And if there’s one area of technological progress that people are supremely confident will keep advancing at warp speed, it’s robots and artificial intelligence.

The egg ship concept is loaded with ethical questions, which can be hashed out in the comments section.

Suspended Animation

As technically ambitious as it may sound, medical science is making incremental progress toward a safe form of human hibernation.

Currently, it’s routine to lower a patient’s body temperature intentionally by a few degrees, thereby inducing a mild hypothermic coma, following cardiac arrest. This enables the brain to recover after oxygen has been cut off, whereas remaining at normal body temperature results in what’s called reperfusion injury.

Not routine yet, but now under clinical trials, trauma surgeons are cooling patients down to just above freezing temperature in cases of severe blood loss. This is true suspended animation. It’s done just for two hours, or possibly three, stalling death so that injuries can be repaired and blood replaced, but the person is basically hibernating during that time.

With incremental progress, the procedure may eventually be extended to time frames of many hours, and eventually days or weeks to treat other conditions. Perhaps, in time, we’ll put people to sleep long enough, and with enough supervision by computers, to slumber away for an entire interstellar voyage the way you now doze off for a transoceanic flight.

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IFTTT’s recipe-based automation is coming to other apps

IFTTT’s recipes are great for getting apps and devices that you use on the regular to interact with each other without being prompted to do so. Before now, you had to download the IFTTT app or visit its website to get everything setup, input your account details and more. That’s about to change. Over the course of the last year, the company has been working with other companies integrate those formulas inside their own apps rather than relying on IFTTT to handle the coordination elsewhere. The result is easy access to expanded features for companies beyond the standard tools their services provide.

The list of partners that are putting IFTTT recipes in their apps right now include the likes of Ring’s video doorbell, Foobot’s indoor pollution monitor, Automatic’s car adapter, Qapital’s banking app, Garageio’s garage door controller, Roger’s voice messenger and more. What’s more, you can create and save IFTTT rules inside those third-party apps as well. If you want Automatic to send its reports on your vehicle to Google Drive for example, you can opt to do that without having to jump over to another app.

IFTTT’s Partner Platform and the ability to sort recipes with the software you’re likely already using is certainly handy, but we’ll be interested to see if more companies opt in. At launch, the full list of partners includes Ring, Qapital, Foobot, Garagrio, Automatic, Awair, Skybell, LIFX, Bloomsky, Roger, Abode and Stack Lighting. The new integration inside those companies’ apps are rolling out now, so if you’re using their connected gadgets and software, you should be able to use the new workflow soon enough.

The expansion for IFTTT comes on the heels of Microsoft announcing its own version of an automated workflow. With Flow, Microsoft connects over 30 services that are mostly focused on streamlining your email, to-do list and other productivity tools. However, a mobile app does some of the same things IFTTT can do, like tweet your Instagram snapshots as actual pictures rather than links. There’s no mention of using those IoT devices with Flow yet, so IFTTT remains your go-to for automating connected gadgets with other tech.

Source: IFTTT

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A German company built a ticket-issuing Terminator

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