https://www.wired.com/story/digital-license-plate-jailbreak-hack/
"Digital license plates, already legal to buy in a growing number of states and
to drive with nationwide, offer a few perks over their sheet metal
predecessors. You can change their display on the fly to frame your plate
number with novelty messages, for instance, or to flag that your car has been
stolen. Now one security researcher has shown how they can also be hacked to
enable a less benign feature: changing a car's license plate number at will to
avoid traffic tickets and tolls—or even pin them on someone else.
Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a
technique to “jailbreak” digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading
vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a
sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal
connectors, he's able to rewrite a Reviver plate's firmware in a matter of
minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license
plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly
change its display to show any characters or image.
That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez points out, could let drivers
with the license plates evade any system that depends on license plate numbers
for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to speeding and parking tickets to
automatic license plate readers that police use to track criminal suspects.
“You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to
be able to do,” says Rodriguez. “Imagine you are going through a speed camera
or if you are a criminal and you don't want to get caught."
Worse still, Rodriguez points out that a jailbroken license plate can be
changed not just to an arbitrary number but also to the number of another
vehicle—whose driver would then receive the malicious user's tickets and toll
bills. “If you can change the license plate number whenever you want, you can
cause some real problems,” Rodriguez says.
All traffic-related mischief aside, Rodriguez also notes that jailbreaking the
plates could also allow drivers to use the plates' features without paying
Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee.
Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates' firmware
exists at the hardware level—in Reviver's chips themselves—Rodriguez says
there's no way for Reviver to patch the issue with a mere software update.
Instead, it would have to replace those chips in each display. That means the
company's license plates are very likely to remain vulnerable despite
Rodriguez's warning—a fact, Rodriguez says, that transport policymakers and law
enforcement should be aware of as digital license plates roll out across the
country. “It's a big problem because now you have thousands of licensed plates
with this issue, and you would need to change the hardware to fix it,” he
says."
Via Violet Blue’s
Cybersecurity Roundup: December 17, 2024
https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-17-118128318
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
