Volkswagen Cars Could be Vulnerable to Wireless Car Hack

A team of researchers from University of Birmingham lead by computer scientist Flavio Garcia discovered a security flaw that can affect millions of Volkswagen vehicles.

"Tedious reverse engineering" of a component in a Volkswagen car's internal network has led to to access of a cryptographic key shared by tens of millions of other Volkswagen vehicles.

Afterwards, hackers can use cheap radio hardware to intercept signals from owners when they unlock their vehicles, aquiring a second cryptographic key, which when used with the first one, can allow hackers to create a clone remote that they can use unlock a target car.

The biggest concern about this vulnerability is that Volkswagen uses the same cryptographic key on many of their vehicles. According to mr. Flavio, Volkswagen has been using four specific keys for 100 million Volkswagen vehicles sold in the past 20 years.

To make matters worse, the same key has also been used in other cars that the Volkswagen has sold during the same time, which includes cars like Audi and Škoda.

Flavio and his team will present more details about this vulnerbaility at the Usenix Security Conference in Austin, Texas, hoping that Volkswagen and outher automakers will take action.

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