The tech used here is the popular Flipper Zero, an ethical hacker’s swiss army knife, capable of all sorts of things such as WiFi attacks or emulating NFC tags. Now, 404 Media has found an underground trade where much shadier hackers sell extra software and patches for the Flipper Zero to unlock all manner of cars, including models popular in the U.S. The hackers say the tool can be used against Ford, Audi, Volkswagen, Subaru, Hyundai, Kia, and several other brands, including sometimes dozens of specific vehicle models, with no easy fix from car manufacturers.
Manufacturers secure their vehicles against unauthorized repair, not against theft.
Also it’s mostly security through obscurity. It is just difficult enough to dissuade most people, but not actually secure because that costs money.
Blaming the flipper zero for hacking is like blaming lockpicking tools for why masterlock sucks so much.
“And to prove it’s not a fluke we’ll do it again!”
This article convinced me to buy a flipper (I’ve been debating it for years). It’s a super useful item that is absolutely going to get banned/hamstrung any day now for putting too much power into people’s hands under the guise of “public safety”.
I want it because it’s so easy to use. I’m no hacker, but with a tool as convenient as this I’m sure I can piece some useful hacks together.
I did this the last time an article about Flipper Zero’s hacking abilities went viral. I was worried about the same thing. Never came to pass, but now I use it to find microchips in lost animals so it was worth it.
It’s cool but not magic. If you’re trying to fuck with something, you need to know what frequency it’s on and what sort of signals do what. There is a bunch of preloaded stuff though, and a wide variety of tools like radio frequencies, nfc, Bluetooth, rfid, and infrared. So far the most useful thing I’ve done is turn the volume down on fox News on tvs in public areas.
Oh one thing I still have to try: some, maybe most handicap buttons for doors are actually radio frequency based and not hard wired, so if you can capture and replay the open signal, you could open a door without hitting the button and look totally jedi.
You can already do that by making the hand motion at an automatic door.
If someone ever calls you on it, just say that you find their lack of faith disturbing.
Canada already banned it. Wish I’d got one sooner
Pretty sure that ban was walked back?
It was indeed. My apologies. I guess the article walking back the ban didn’t get as much traction as the one banning it.
No apologies needed. Although, ordering one before they reban it again may or may not be something to consider.
If you can hack a car with a flipper zero, then the car manufacturers failed to implement the most basic security protocols. Complain to them, and demand a fix.
Fucking real! My car (2016 Toyota Avalon) uses a rolling code for the transponder! It’s like one of the most basic things any manufacturer can do to avoid this shit! And it can’t be more than a few dozen lines of code (I’m no expert so this may be an exaggeration)?
It is almost like their should be something written down somewhere. Like a guideline or rule or something…
Oh that is right, it is called a regulation requiring basic wireless security for extremely expensive consumer items.
Nope can’t do that.
Won’t someone think of the multi billion dollar corporations‽
Trouble is the move to complete computerization. Back in the day we had physical keys which turned a physical switch to physically connect the power from battery to wake ECU. Now, we have a button that sends a REQUEST to the ECU to turn on or off, and as long as an acceptable transponder is around it will accept the request. If you turn your car off when u hit that stop button it REQUESTS that the ECU shut down assuming conditions are met. I have had a problem 202w wrangler JL turn on fine but refuse to shut off untill you pulled the terminals off the battery. This new age hyper computerized nonsense is why every mechanic hates these new age techno bullshit wanna-be computer appliances on wheels, canbus can be awesome for keeping all modules on the same page but one bad wire and the whole system takes a shit.
202w wrangler
Well, Jeep is not really a name for good innovation. They are stuck with a management that still thinks “mechanics” and sees electronics as a pure profit center, not as a gear in the system that has to be as reliable as the rest of it.
Yea I have not been impressed with the Stellantis products of late lol. If I want to own a complicated headache I’ll just buy a bmw or Audi lol (of which I have had both and both have been more dependable and straight forward than these new Chrysler products…)
Give us fucking keys and BUTTONS. We dont want or need this tech shit they want to shove into everything so they can show cancerous growth to ther shareholders.
The real issue here is that the systems that car manufacturers use for their vehicles are insecure and outdated. The Flipper Zero is just exposing their bad design decisions.
“We’re seeing an increase in new care purchases” “What changed?” “We made them super easy to steal”
On the bright side, all the car thieves that knew how to open a steering lock have all grown up, so a club lock is probably going to be the best defence outside of a kill switch. Great for road rage, too
Cue governments banning working with electronics to stop auto theft and also save the children
And here I am just using my flipper zero to turn my fan on and off since the remote that came with it sucks.
Same. This whole time I could be driving a new car each day. What a waste.
Just go to a car park, close your eyes, spin around 3 times and hit the flipper zero.
It’s like a lucky dip!
I use it at work to clone a customer’s proximity card when I work in their building so they don’t have to leave me theirs to get around. The one legitimate use I found.
I guess being able to trigger the customer service announcement without having to find a button in a store is nice.
That’s … not a legitimate use.
That’s probably debatable, if they have permission. They probably shouldn’t have been given permission, but that’s a separate issue
Ideally, there should be a visitor card available to be used, with its clearances configured as appropriate for the visitor in question. Having a person hand over their own card (and PIN, if applicable) isn’t a great idea either, but it’s far better than copying that card, with or without permission (probably without, if we’re being honest).
Oh, absolutely. It’s not something which should be encouraged, and against a well designed modern system it probably isn’t possible (there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market).
I’m just saying it isn’t unambiguously “illegitimate”
there must be some challenge-response type NFC systems on the market
There are. Hotels use them for door key cards so they can’t be cloned.
Unfortunately… I was trying to clone a room key to my phone so I could just tap to enter when I stay 10 weeks in the same room.
I usually do it when we take over a customer’s access control system and we have half their doors on the new system and half in the old still and are migrating them over. I’m an electronic security tech, this is what I do for a living.
That’s the definition of a legitimate use.
Cloning keycards temporarily with permission (until new ones are made.) Breaking into your own or a friend’s car because the keys were left inside (until you get the keys back)
Cloning a TV remote just to lower the volume to a sane degree and turn it off (until they get a new TV, remote or find the old one).
Legitimate is a anything that you’re allowed to do. It’s a simple process to test legitimacy:
Did someone ask you if you can help?
If yes, did you tell them what you’d do?
If yes, did they agree?
And once you did whatever it was they agreed to, did you keep your ability to do the same thing in the aim of doing something they didn’t consent to (once you cloned their car key, do you plan on stealing the car? Or once you cloned their remote, do you have an insatiable urge to fuck with them by abusing the remote?)
If you answer “yes” to all except the last one, the use is legitimate in 99.9% of cases.
The only reason this may be considered a non-legitimate use would be if you attached the exclusive economic right of making repairs or new keys to the OEM, which isn’t how a sane world works.
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And besides, tools like the Flipper truly are hacking tools. Today hacking has a bad rep, and the word used to mean more like hack something together.
Imagine Bob who is a DIY type of guy. His TV starts falling apart because the plastic casing broke. Bob takes some duct tape and glues the casing together. As the TV stand is also a bit wonky, he takes some screws as well just to be safe. He doesn’t plan on keeping it for too long, just until he can find a fitting replacement that’s not too expensive. Most likely, he’s bound to keep it until the next Black Friday.
Bob just successfully hacked something up to keep his TV from falling apart.
That’s the origin of the word “hacking”. “To hack up” got shortened by attaching a new meaning to the verb, without bothering with the entire phrase, and making it relate only to electronic/digital hacking. So the TV example isn’t hacking, but it is hacking up. It means “to make some temporary fix until a proper one isn’t found”.
Today, hacking has been conflated with exploiting and breaking digital locks, which is not what the original phrase meant.
le·git·i·mate adjective /ləˈjidəmət/
- conforming to the law or to rules.
“Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law” - Aleister Crowley
seems legit to me…
If you’re using Crowley to support what’s legitimate, you’re gonna have problems.
that’s the only thing i use from him…
You don’t do sex rituals to summon the antichrist? Lame.
well yeah, but i make my own antichrist summoning rituals
Oh I think I used it to unlock some extra characters in Skylanders at some point too, but I don’t really play those types of games anymore.
Using NFC amibo codes for freebies in switch Zelda
I like to hijack the robot vacuum when I go to DnD and ring my parents doorbell when I visit.
I tried deciphering this sentence with Dungeons’n’Dragons and Do Not Disturb and neither makes sense
The physical IRL location where I show up to play Dungeons n Dragons, and not in game. DM’s got a robot vacuum.
You can get devices that connect to home assistant for that too! (Just a comment, not a suggestion that you are doing anything wrong.)
I do the same with mine. 😜
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It is true that this device can be used nefariously. But it’s just a computer with a wide variety of very basic and common communication methods along with software to exploit them. There are many other computers like it that are just less popular. And to ban it is to ban said basic communication hardware like radio, WiFi, NFC, etc.
The solution is to mandate companies to provide a minimum level of security. Even giant companies with good reputations have giant security holes, like Apple or your bank, implementing mandatory SMS as 2FA. That shit should be illegal.
The people who write the laws specifically like that exploit.
Huh?
SMS 2fa. The feds love that shit and would never let a law requiring something better to pass.
Oh, haha, I bet.
“ethical hacker’s swiss army knife” I hate it when they always add “ethical”. First of all, when you say ethical you mean law-fearing, they don’t really care about ethics and, secondly, “regular” hackers use it too, so it’s just a hacker’s swiss army knife…
Dude, do you want individual hacking to become illegal? Because people who are not hacking daily are prone to forgetting that some hackers don’t actually act maliciously.
Also, yes, some hackers are ethical and do care. Not you, obviously. But some.
Yeah, I definitely read that as an effort to preempt the folks who were going to yell about how clearly this means the Flipper Zero should be illegal. Hacking has been so poorly represented in TV and films that there are a distressing number of people who don’t realize the term can even have a positive connotation.
I do not want any hacking device to be illegal, as they can be used for good(overthrowing the state and capitalism).
That’s what you think is good about hacking? That’s not how this works. That’s not how any of this works. That’s what you get when you get your education from TV.
Hacking means “misusing/modifying crap to work how you want”.
Ethical hacking is e.g. modifying devices you own to run software you want, like e.g. running homebrew software on a game console. It is finding and reporting security vulnerabilities so that companies can improve their security. It is modifying software or devices to e.g. removing privacy problems or tracking.
And ethical hacking and law-abiding hacking aren’t the same either, since some ethical hacking activities might be illegal (e.g. violating restrictions on modifying devices) and some legal hacking activities might not be ethical (e.g. using legal hacking to dox people).
And ethical hacking and law-abiding hacking aren’t the same either
I prefer saying ‘grey hat’ instead of ‘ethical hacker’ because ethical hacker is now used to mean ‘pentester’, ‘red teamer’ and all the other cybersecurity stuff, or so it seems to me.
that was the entire meaning of my comment, I clearly didn’t make it clear enough.
All of that is under the umbrella term of ethical hacker. Black/grey/white hat are some very outdated and unclear terms, and also terms that non-tech people don’t really understand.
Ethical hacker is a term that lay people also understand and because of that it has replaced the rest of these terms.
(And also, “ethical hacker” encompasses both the grey and white hat. So it’s not an equivalent term to “grey hat”.)
not doing something by fear of the law is not ethical. that said, some of them are ethical, but ethical hacker would mostly include grey hats, which they wouldn’t want because they can’t say illegal hackers use their device.
“ethical hacker” is not defined as “someone who only hacks in fear of law”. That’s my point. Hackers with ethics do lots of shit. Some of them work within the law, some of them work sideways to the law, but your code of ethics and your legal code aren’t quite the same thing, and you assuming they are is surprising.
I’m pretty sure that’s what’s meant by ‘ethical hacker’ in most cases and that’s why I wanted to point out the difference you are pointing out right now.
My ethical gun is safer than your criminal gun.
To be clear, the flipper is just a Girl Tech IM-me with an NFC chip. If it lets people do a thing, that thing has been possible for decades. Just wait until someone makes a popular device based on a cheap fully featured wideband SDR like the AD9363 or LMS7002. Shit is gonna get fucking wild.
Girl Tech?
Bro.
Stares in old lady
It’s like how people think the Raspberry Pi is the only single board computer.
Lol yeah a very cheap rtlsdr with a chip for transmission can do the same as a flipper. Flipper just makes it easy.
Weren’t Kia Boys stealing cars with literally just a USB cable since it physically fit to turn the ignition behind the key cylinder?
That doesn’t require buying a special device, it was mostly crimes of convenience. I doubt the Flipper Zero will ever get that widespread.You’d be surprised what people will pay for a striker hellcat. Yea it’s never gonna be as common, but it will happen. It is easier to steal a hellcat with a flipper zero than to pull apart a column to get behind the ignition and turn it without the key, if anything hacking into cars is quicker and easier than defeating a physical key! My SO push button 15 Jetta could easily be stolen with a flipper, but my 87 YJ with a physical key requires an understanding of the wiring system and the time to tear down the column to be stolen. Any dunce capable of buying a flipper loaded with appropriate software can easily steal any new push button car.
Really? I see these fairly often on local fb marketplace. I was tempted out of curiosity to get one but I dont have a use outside of mucking about.
outside of mucking about.
The best use case of all.
They don’t really have many legitimate, practical uses for most people. They’re ideal for pentesters.
Prentending to be hackerman is a legit usecase IMHO. They do seem like fun, but I personally can’t justify the cost.
I would definitely play with one if I had one
Thought cars were bad, not sure many people have an understanding of how our emergency broadcasts and alerts work. US needs some huge infrastructure updates.
Can you be more specific? It’s not like you’re the first person to think about the nefarious uses of emergency alerts.
I dont want to be too specific, there is a reason, I work with radio infrastructure quite a bit. A lot of these systems hide behind obscurity alone. Not great against national actors that may want to do harm.
Wow yes you’re very smart for knowing that unencrypted radio is unencrypted.
I kinda want to see if this would work on my car since the proximity detection of the keyfob only works about half the time anyway.
Yes let me stalk someone to steal their car temporarily. Honestly this thing is kinda a toy on par with my rooted LG V20 with its IR blaster and USB C port that I can plug anything into or my HP stream with a software defined radio I played around with. These people are kinda making software for the wrong type of devices to be frank with ya and I cannot wait until someone makes some weird app and USB C dongle for an android phone to replace the Flipper Zero with. You don’t even need to have root access for this as apps can just take over the USB port anyway on your phone.
I think you’re missing the point this article is trying to make… It’s not an advertisement for Flipper Zero, it’s a scare piece implying the device’s existence is bad
Honestly yeah that does also kinda piss me off because my phone or laptop can essentially already do the same stuff. Like this toy is basically getting mixed up as some actual hacking tool while in reality it’s just a little dinky device that you can do cool things with. Like control your TV or have it shout back RF at things. The entire main purpose of this device is to serve as a digital pet to maintain which I think is cute and charming. I’m probably definitely going to buy one in the future to piss off my local government.
SDR devices with usb support and controlled by android apps is very much already a thing.
Yeah exactly no root access required.
