A couple of relevant tweets from one of the authors on twitter:<p>"Tesla responded to this by upgrading key fobs’ encryption in June and adding an optional PIN to cars last month. If your Model S is older than June, you can get a new key fob, turn on a PIN, or disable passive (no-click) unlocking" <a href="https://twitter.com/a_greenberg/status/1039202487822106624" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/a_greenberg/status/1039202487822106624</a><p>"Just one more thing. Everybody is making fun of Tesla for using a 40-bit key (and rightly so). But Tesla at least had a mechanism we could report to and fixed the problem once informed. @McLarenAuto, @KarmaAutomotive, and @UKTriumph use the same system and ignored us." <a href="https://twitter.com/TomerAshur/status/1039245324441792513" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/TomerAshur/status/1039245324441792513</a>
Most keyless systems are insecure in several other ways to a surprising degree for this decade.<p>Even in more recent years, most of them seemingly do not implement<p>(1) Time of flight checks, e.g. that a radio relay isn't being used to get to the keyfob many more meters away in the house using a relay/amplifier. This is a commonly exploited theft method currently. The Apple watch implements this to unlock your MacBook Pro(!) This has also been shown to be a viable attack method on many contactless payment terminals.<p>(2) Replay protection - another possible common attack is to receive the rolling code from transmitter, jam it so the car can't hear it and wait for the remote to transmit a second one. Then you jam that also, store that code, but then re-transmit the first code and the car unlocks and now you have a second code to use to unlock the car later. It's possible to both receive and jam the code by using a very precise tuned receiver, and jam in the surrounding the frequencies which in most cases the actual receiver (e.g. car) won't have filtered out. This works particularly well on most garage doors.<p>(3) Let alone having some kind of recoverable/brute forcible ID scheme, which as we can see here, is also true. I'm sure these aren't the only ones.<p>It's kindof silly really. I'd be curious to know if any manufacturers have been fixing this in the last couple of years.
Not just Model S:<p>"We have only been able to verify our attack on a Tesla Model S in practice. However, Tesla did not design this system themselves but purchased it from Pektron. ... Pektron also designed keyless entry solutions for manufacturers such as McLaren, Karma and Triumph. ... This leads us to believe that the attack described here also affects the other manufacturers."
Oh dear. Seriously, 24-bit and 40-bit crypto of any variety?<p>Was it really so hard in the year 2013 to put at least a 128-bit AES key in the card?<p>With a sufficient directional panel antenna you could impersonate a car and query pocketed fobs in whole crowds of somewhat wealthy individuals. Aim the antenna and rig at the seating area of a trade show for middle/upper management types in the technology industry, for instance.