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Pegasus

has put on everyone's lips how relatively easy it is to enter a person's mobile phone through a simple WhatsApp message, including the mobile of the Prime Minister,

Cars are increasingly controlled from a mobile phone that can be used as a key through the brand's mobile application that also allows you to manage more vehicle functions: turn on the heating or air conditioning to heat or cool the passenger compartment, manage the charging an electric vehicle and even being able to move the vehicle forward or backward to park from outside the vehicle.

Using the mobile as access to the vehicle makes the latter recognize it as the key

and when it is close and with the bluetooth activated, the car opens.

This occurs in numerous brands, including Tesla, one of the forerunners in turning the car into an extension of the mobile.

It has been written about ad nauseam that

is not just a car company.

It is a technological giant.

in favor of the mobile one.

However, the display of modernity and revolution could lead to major problems in the cybersecurity field.

According to the firm NCC Group, it is possible to hack some of its most popular models.

Preceding

The report by Sultan Qasim Kham, a security expert at the Manchester-based NCC, believes it's possible to trick the Tesla's system into thinking the owner is physically near the vehicle, a theory that fits with what he published in January. a 19-year-old German security expert, David Colombo, who managed to hack the signal of 25 models of the electric giant in various parts of the world.

Colombo explained on his blog how he managed to access the cars through TeslaMate

, a tool that tracks from the level of consumption of vehicles to the history of the car on the road.

The Dinkelsbühl teenager took advantage of security flaws in the system to manipulate cars in thirteen different countries, something he blamed on the owners and not on the company.

In the test, Qasim has managed to

precisely by hacking the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) transmission that occurs between the car and the mobile or the smart key.

It is not new that a car can be hacked through bluetooth.

The novelty lies in the fact that years after the first robberies after intercepting the frequency in which the remote control and the vehicle it opens operate, the interception of the communication between the remote control or mobile and the car continues to be a simple back door to control your car.

Through his Twitter account, he reported how he was able to open and close doors and windows and even start vehicles remotely.

He denies, however, that they can be operated remotely.

"There should be no way anyone can walk up to some Tesla that they don't own and take it for a spin," Colombo wrote on his blog.

It could lead, in his opinion, to very dangerous situations along the way.

bluetooth to steal

According to NCC Group, it has developed

capable of intercepting the signal between the hand or the mobile and the corresponding vehicle in a certain radius of action.

Specifically, this company explains that "as the typical connection intervals for this BLE system are 30 milliseconds or more, and the additional latency is within the normal response time variation range for BLE devices, the additional latency can be made invisible for vehicle and phone software".

"In addition, this new type of relay attack can relay connections that employ BLE link layer encryption, including tracking encrypted connections through parameter changes (such as channel map changes, connection interval, and transmission window shift). This relay attack tool can be used for any device that communicates via BLE and is not specific to Tesla vehicles," NCC states.

iPhone 13 Mini and Tesla Model 3

The

, NCC Group was able to unlock and driving the vehicle while the iPhone was out of the vehicle's BLE range.

In the test configuration, the iPhone was placed on the top floor at the far end of a house, approximately 25 meters from the vehicle, which was in the garage on the ground floor.

The phone-side streaming device was placed in a separate room from the iPhone, approximately 7 meters from the phone.

The vehicle-side relay device was able to unlock the vehicle when placed within approximately 3 meters of the vehicle.

The company explains that it has not tested the attack against a Tesla Model Y but believes that it can be used "given the similarity of technologies used by both models."

During the experiment to identify latency limits,

artificially added round-trip latency beyond the base level of latency introduced by the relay tool over of a local Wi-Fi network.

This latency margin should be enough to perform long-distance relay attacks over the Internet.

However, "NCC Group has not attempted any long-distance relay attacks against Tesla vehicles."

security PIN

NCC states that it would be nice to

or have the mobile app report the last known location of the mobile device during the authentication process with the vehicle, so that the vehicle can detect and Repel long-distance relay attacks.

Remember that many users wrap their car controls in aluminum foil to prevent hacking, or even, in the US, some put it in the refrigerator to isolate its frequency and prevent it from being intercepted.

Remedies more analog than digital.

Many may think that this would be solved with the traditional analog key.

Digitization does not have a plan B in many new models that no longer use a physical key, such as the case of Tesla, whose cars are opened with a card and started by pressing the brake, a functionality that traditional manufacturers such as Volkswagen have copied with their electric or the new ones, like Polestar.

In fact, one of the main attractions of a Tesla is forgetting about the key and being able to manage its functions from your mobile.

Conforms to The Trust Project criteria

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