- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts::The Canadian government plans to ban the Flipper Zero and similar devices after tagging them as tools thieves can use to steal cars.
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Oh shit, I wanted to steal a car but now because of this ban it will be illegal, how bad.
Yeah, since we can’t stop murderers, we should do nothing about it.
Banning flipper is exactly that- doing nothing- because you can’t actually use one to steal a car.
The thing we should do is to hold car manufacturers accountable for neglecting security in cars.
Remember, the “s” in IoT stands for security.
nice one
Flipper Zero can’t be used to hijack any car, specifically the ones produced after the 1990s, since their security systems have rolling codes
So actually doing nothing.
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If you truly want to solve something then you have to make some draconian-like laws and enforce it with rigorous effort. Sometimes the harshest measures are the safest measures.
Now tell everyone how banning a device which can’t be used for car thefts, will somehow help with car thefts.
I think we’d all like to know.
Or, you know, it’s incredibly stupid to ban. But what do I know? Other than that you can’t use a flipper to steal a car of course.
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Ah, thank you!🥰
“If you want to stop murders just ban kitchen knives.” --canadian politicians
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Let’s establish an international anti-murder day. It won’t save anyone, but at least we did SOMETHING!
We can’t stop murderers, so let’s band all guns, knives, baseball bats and tire irons.
I do agree with the gun part, the rest are up to serious debate.
They were being sarcastic.
I know.
Classic response, don’t hold the billion dollar corpos who actually design and manufacture the cars responsible. Ban the little device that exposes the flaws in their designs.
Yeah, let’s entirely outlaw pentesting while we’re at it. What could possibly go wrong? 🙈
Lets outlaw devices that could be used for pentesting while we’re at it. PCs, laptops, phones, etc.
Don’t forget paperclips, string, and aerosol cans. Hell, we should probably just ban wire altogether.
Lock picks are still legal in Canada
Brains. Technically that is the most useful device when pentesting. Along with curiosity. Altho on the former, I believe we, as a society, have actually started to…
SDR manufacturers with billion dollar government contracts:
It doesn’t even do that
lol, you can do many things with a flipper zero. Stealing a car is not one of those things.
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”
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
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.
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.
That is my understanding and why I haven’t ventured into that area with my personal vehicles yet.
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.
Flipper Zero - Wikipedia Flipper Zero is a portable Tamagotchi-like multi-functional device developed for interaction with access control systems. The device is able to read, copy, and emulate RFID and NFC tags, radio remotes, iButton, and digital access keys, along with a GPIO interface.
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?
“Flipper Zero can’t be used to hijack any car, specifically the ones produced after the 1990s, since their security systems have rolling codes,” Flipper Devices COO Alex Kulagin told BleepingComputer.
I guess Canada must have a ton of old cars?
Or the “rolling codes” have glaring implementation issues, but it is cheaper to ban the Flipper Zero than recall the cars, so the manufacturers made an executive decision… (⚠️ YouTube)
It also can’t be used to hijack cars produced before the 1990s, since they mostly don’t have keyless entry in the first place.
Rolljack attacks are absolutely not trivial to pull off and I am quite skeptical that a flipper can even do it reliably, if at all, since it requires reactively jamming the transmission after the attacker has already decoded it. I don’t believe these devices have enough power to reliably jam the key fob, much less the speed to do it reactively.
Literally nobody is using flippers to steal cars. Grow the fuck up.
They’re just doing it to get the votes of the people that see headlines like this and think it’s a good thing without reading the article at all.
Next, ban radio waves, because car companies are too damn dense to create a proper product lol
I’m surprised no fobs use a time-based token to prevent replay attacks. Would make it a bit of a bitch to replace the battery, but hey-ho, tradeoffs.
They use rolling codes that aren’t susceptible to FlipperZero anyway. This is a dog and pony show.
they use rolling codes
All of them? Source?
It’s been that way for a long time, it’s just kinda the accepted way. The vehicle builders had seen what garage door systems problems came about from hard-switched or dip-switched codes and just went that way from the start.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remote_keyless_system#Security
The newer vehicles have these always-on systems now, the owner doesn’t have to press a specific button. So theives can amplify the fob signal that’s constantly being emitted in the house and get the car to open, then program new keys once they’re in the vehicle and drive away. But that has nothing to do with the Flipper, that’s just a radio repeater.
Instead of a time based token they should have authentication. To start the car you need biometric or passcode or Bluetooth to connect and the fob.
For the life of me I don’t understand why my phone has better security than my car.
Cause what’s in the title is normal news. That’s why. Dumbasses having power to decide for us that it’s the tools to blame.
More of an issue with the fob being to connect to a service to get the current time. Technically possible, but would add cost. And if that time is ever out of sync it just won’t work.
I can put an RTC in an Arduino for about $8. It keeps time accurately. If it gets out of sync, maybe a Bluetooth connection to let it do an NTP request through another device.
Cellular connectivity is not required.
RTC’s are not inherently accurate. You have an RTC in your computer, but disconnect it from the internet for a year and it’s extremely unlikely it will be able to pass an OTP check.
Add to that the fact that RTCs run off power, means that the fob would need to actively pull from the battery 24/7. What happens when that battery voltage drops below the required power level? The time goes out of sync. Not to mention you need to change the battery at some point.
Adding Bluetooth would be a terrible idea. You’d then need to make sure the device can receive firmware updates, and we all know the reputation car companies have for updates to things.
Better option would be to receive the date and time from a transmission, be it FM or cell. And no, you wouldn’t have to pay for cell.
The problem comes when you’re in an area that doesn’t have these available, which is still quite possible in the US.
So we loop back to these not really being that viable. They will work most of the time, in most instances. But they’d be shooting themselves in the foot in certain places and with certain users.
Might as well outlaw crowbars because they can be used to break into houses…
Fucking idiots who’s microwaves blink midnight for decades think they can make meaningful decisions about tech.
That’s fucking bullshit wtf. This is exactly like bad gun reform that comes from someone who doesn’t know shit about the thing they are trying to reform
Welcome to Canada. Turning dials that aren’t connected to anything is the specialty of our “leaders”.
Canada u okay
no
The only thing our lawmakers know how to do is ban things to look like they’re doing something when really they have no idea how to actually bring effectual change or fix the problems.
Flipper zero, foreign buyers, handguns…
We’re a country of 3 monopolies in a trenchcoat… run by a party of corrupt idiots, whose replacements look even more incompetent.
No we are not
That’s not how thieving works….
Honestly, I am embarrassed with the whole “look like were doing something” shtick by my government. An expensive gathering of decision makers from various sectors, a National Summit, just to say: we are now gonna be soooo tough on crime and let’s ban the toy we just saw on TikTok.
Car theft was a major problem before 2010 until engine immobilizers became mandatory since 2007 on all vehicles made in Canada
Then everyone got too comfortable. The regulatory bodies and car manufacturers were too focused pretending doing some work and publishing all the buzzword-of-the-day “accomplishments” they were doing while patting each others backs without explicitely requiring manufacturers to comply/implement immediately anything. Meanwhile, manufacturers were happy to integrate almost off-the-shelf “children’s RC” car starter pack obfuscated through invisible/non-existent security and protected under dubious industrial secrets.
Obviously, criminals smelled the easy money. Starting around 2013 — mystery car unlocking device | 2015 — signal repeater car burglary, car thefts by relay attacks were known by automakers but ignored as one-offs, too technical, already dealt with by law enforcement to lets pretent it’s not that big of a problem or leave it to the police. Meanwhile, insurance claim replacement vehicles are selling like hotcakes and it is “convenient” to ignore the problem.
The following years various reprogramming theft become known and finally CAN bus injection — new form of keyless car theft that works in under 2 minutes or in depth investigation by Dr. Ken Tindell, becomes so easy, so cheap and widely available that even kids uses them to gain Youtube/TikTok followers.
Car hacking was a becoming serious concern during the pandemic, but now it’s simply ridiculous and as if current automaker included/provided anti-theft/GPS tracking were (un)knowingly made “defective”.
Hence, everyone is playing catch up and blaming left and right on who is responsible for this in-slow-motion public safety disaster.
Brian Kingston, president and CEO of the Canadian Vehicle Manufacturers’ Association, which includes Ford Motor Company of Canada, General Motors of Canada and Stellantis, said increasing the risk of prosecution is the most effective way to deter vehicle theft.
“And at the same time, providing more outbound inspection controls at the ports to prevent the flow of stolen vehicles to foreign markets by organized criminal organizations,” he added.
New vehicle safety standards have been published (rushed?) recently. We will see if all the panic settles down like after 2007.
Moreover, the exponential prevalence of car theft also laid bare the incredibly poor and ineffective security at the various ports of Canada. Unsurprisingly, it has been a known constant devolution:
(Reposting my same reply for a similar thread about the Canadian Government banning the Flipper Zero, please check my post history for the other thread)
Might as well ban brains too, you need that to steal a car.
I thought the US was already working on that?
What is a flipper zero?
It has a bunch of abilities, but the most important one is that it can recieve and transmit radio signals that can trick devices like remote door locks and garage door openers into thinking that a key was pressed to open them, but only if they don’t have proper security systems set up. It’s built for penetration testing on systems to see how secure they are
I still don’t understand
The Flipper Zero is a portable and programmable pen-testing tool that helps experiment with and debug various hardware and digital devices over multiple protocols, including RFID, radio, NFC, infrared, and Bluetooth.
Pen-testing is short for penetration testing. Which is testing if you can break into the things. Like a locked office or a computer system, etc. Legally, it’s done to find flaws that need to be fixed before they get used nefariously.
Pen testing techniques and tools are essentially break in tools. In this case, a tool for mimicking car key fobs and the wireless signals they send to the car.
Pen-testing: penetration testing, basically good guy hacking to find security vulnerabilities so that they can be fixed, basically finding out how easy a security system is to penetrate.
Debugging: fixing problems in hardware and software
RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification), radio, NFC (Near Field Communication,) infrared, Bluetooth: different forms of wireless communication.
RFID is used for stuff like security tags on merchandise, car key fobs
NFC is similar (you could probably make an argument that NFC is basically a type of RFID) with a very short range used for things like making payments with your phone
Bluetooth you’re probably somewhat familiar with, in used for a lot of consumer electronics, wireless headphones, speakers, computer mice, etc.
All of those use radio waves in some form to pass information from one device to another.
Infrared uses a infrared light to send information, the most common use you’ve probably seen is for TV remotes, which is why you have to point the remote at the TV to work, you’re basically flashing an invisible flashlight at the sensor on the TV
This device can basically mimic any of those kinds of signals allowing it access, control, or bypass devices and systems that use those protocols.
This can be useful for people working on those kinds of systems, you don’t need to have the actual key card, remote, device, etc. to test it out, you can try a bunch of different configurations without needing to reprogram the card a bunch of times, and gives you a lot of options to test for different vulnerabilities and issues.
But those same capabilities make it attractive to people who would use it maliciously. If they don’t have the right security measures in place, something like this device could be used to gain access to secure areas by spoofing a key card, unlock cars, interfere with cell phones, snoop on wireless communications, gain access to a someone’s devices, etc.
It’s basically a 2 way radio with tools for those who like to mess with the radio spectrum. That’s the most simple explanation I can make for such a device.
Never heard of these devices but now I kinda want one.
streisand effect they are going to be sold out everywhere now
They already were.
Do it, they’re a lot of fun to play with.
That’s all Trudeau has been good for, for years, attempting to appear to do something about a problem but never, never, ever, actually fixing anything, but also inconveniencing/ removing rights or making criminals out of ancillary people to the actual issue.
