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Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts
(www.bleepingcomputer.com)
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this post was submitted on 10 Feb 2024
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Well it can give access to a car. Soooo…
Only 30+ year old cars, but a coat hanger can do that too. Soooo...
“Trudeau to ban coat hangers, other clothing care items, after rash of thefts of ancient vehicles”
And you need additional hardware and custom firmware. Then you have to GitHub that shit into the flipper.
Most people think it works like Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver. Just press a button, wave it around and voila! You’re in the NSA database.
Signal playback doesn't require anything extra. I love that their docs have a giant warning to not use it on new cars though.
Isn't that because it can desync the actual keyfob?
Nvm... Clicked the link. That's exactly why you shouldn't do that.
That is my understanding and why I haven’t ventured into that area with my personal vehicles yet.
Ah, so the cars still have shitty security implementations, only now it's in the direction of "car needs service if someone tries to playback a previous signal".
Though how does it work when you hit the button while out of range of the car?
It should be each fob has a private key that is used to generate a cryptographic hash of a random challenge string. Or hell, even give a rolling code a sequence number so they the car and fob can resync if necessary (I don't think this would break the security, since the sequence could be started at a number other than 0).
That sounds dangerously close to an open standard that would prevent charging $500 for key fobs.
Any open standard can be tweaked slightly to make it a closed propriety one!
Though I do wish open standards were enforced for cars. Instead of each car/platform essentially being a mini monopoly that third parties need to design for specifically if they want to compete.
Is that why I haven't seen a wire coat hanger in forever?
No the world just ran out of coat hanger bones and is trying to hide it with plastic replacements
Who are you fooling? Tech savvy people don’t know how to handle coat hangers.
Plus videos show you that it also works on newer cars. To much Hassle though, but thatch’s also mentioned in the article.
Those videos are staged. The signal playback trick doesn't work on newer cars because the code changes every time you lock or unlock your car. You could probably replicate the functionality of a key fob on your Flipper, but it would need to be registered with the car's computer the same as any other key fob, which means you'd already have to have to access to the car.
There are definitely some basic attacks that you can do with a flipper. They are quite a bit more limited than what you can do with an SDR though, and I'm skeptical that they are widely deployed by anyone. You definitely can't steal a car like this, you can possibly unlock one. But hammers are much more useful in that regard and have a significantly lower skill floor.
Butter knives can be used to murder people. Quick let's ban them to solve all murder.
JFC.
He/she stated that you can’t steal a car with a flipper. But you can. That it isn’t a go to tool is something else.
Besides this, you can use a flipper as a butter knife…
Snow fucking white.
Yes it can be used to steal some cars.
Banning it because it can be used to steal cars doesn't make sense
Btw... Some folks may not realize it is a go to tool for many things.
It is a swiss army knife for RF access control systems as well as harmless, related things like remote controls.
It is used by penetration testers (information security professionals) to do myriad kinds of legit, legal work in their field.
Like any tool it can be used for good or evil. The problem isn't the tool but the vulnerabilities in cars demonstrating shocking negligence on the part of manufacturers.
Banning the tools just gives us a false sense of security. The vulnerability still exists. It isn't that difficult for someone to either get the tool, reproduce the tool, or make a new tool with existing parts. Meanwhile law abiding people cannot find the vulnerabilities as easily.
This mostly only serves to penalize a smallish company and protect large car manufacturers from the consequences of their negligence.
It is already illegal to steal cars. Why would criminals risking felony jail time care about whether their tools are suddenly illegal, too?