Radio Attack Lets Hackers Steal 24 Different Car Models
By Andy Greenberg
Mar 21 2016

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For years, car owners with keyless entry systems have reported thieves approaching their vehicles with mysterious devices and effortlessly opening them in seconds. After having his Prius burgled repeatedly outside his Los Angeles home, the New York Times‘ former tech columnist Nick Bilton came to the conclusion that the thieves must be amplifying the signal from the key fob in the house to trick his car’s keyless entry system into thinking the key was in the thieves’ hand. He eventually resorted to keeping his keys in the freezer.

Now a group of German vehicle security researchers has released new findings about the extent of that wireless key hack, and their work ought to convince hundreds of thousands of drivers to keep their car keys next to their Pudding Pops. The Munich-based automobile club ADAC late last week made public a study it had performed on dozens of cars to test a radio “amplification attack” that silently extends the range of unwitting drivers’ wireless key fobs to open cars and even start their ignitions, as first reported by the German business magazine WirtschaftsWoche. The ADAC researchers say that 24 different vehicles from 19 different manufacturers were all vulnerable, allowing them to not only reliably unlock the target vehicles but also immediately drive them away.

“This clear vulnerability in [wireless] keys facilitates the work of thieves immensely,” reads a post in German about the researchers’ findings on the ADAC website. “The radio connection between keys and car can easily be extended over several hundred meters, regardless of whether the original key is, for example, at home or in the pocket of the owner.”

That car key hack is far from new: Swiss researchers published a paper detailing a similar amplification attack as early as 2011. But the ADAC researchers say they can perform the attack far more cheaply than those predecessors, spending just $225 on their attack device compared with the multi-thousand-dollar software-defined radios used in the Swiss researchers’ study. They’ve also tested a larger array of vehicles and, unlike the earlier study, released the specific makes and models of which vehicles were susceptible to the attack; they believe that hundreds of thousands of vehicles in driveways and parking lots today remain open to the wireless theft method.

The Vulnerable Makes and Models

Here’s the full list of vulnerable vehicles from their findings, which focused on European models: the Audi A3, A4 and A6, BMW’s 730d, Citroen’s DS4 CrossBack, Ford’s Galaxy and Eco-Sport, Honda’s HR-V, Hyundai’s Santa Fe CRDi, KIA’s Optima, Lexus’s RX 450h, Mazda’s CX-5, MINI’s Clubman, Mitsubishi’s Outlander, Nissan’s Qashqai and Leaf, Opel’s Ampera, Range Rover’s Evoque, Renault’s Traffic, Ssangyong’s Tivoli XDi, Subaru’s Levorg, Toyota’s RAV4, and Volkswagen’s Golf GTD and Touran 5T. Only the BMW i3 resisted the researchers’ attack, though they were still able to start its ignition. And the researchers posit—but admit they didn’t prove—that the same technique likely would work on other vehicles, including those more common in the United States, with some simple changes to the frequency of the equipment’s radio communications.

The ADAC released a video that shows surveillance camera footage of a real-world theft that seemed to use the technique, as well as a demonstration by the group’s own researchers.