Detecting Car Keyfob Jamming With a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR
It’s been known for a while now that it is possible to break into cars using simple wireless attacks that involve jamming of the car keyfob frequency. Sammy Kamkars “rolljam” is one such example that can be built with a cheap Arduino and RF transceiver chip. One way to secure yourself against wireless attacks like this is to run a jammer detector.
A jammer detector is quite simple in theory – just continuously measure the signal strength at the car keyfob frequency and notify the user if a strong continuous signal is detected. Over on his blog author mikeh69 has posted about his work in creating a wireless jammer detector out of a Raspberry Pi and RTL-SDR dongle. He uses a Python script and some C code that he developed to create a tool that displays the signal strength on an onscreen bar graph and also conveys signal strength information via audio tones. He writes that with a pair of earphones and battery pack you can use the system while walking around searching for the source of a jammer.
Mikeh69’s post goes into further detail about installing the software and required dependencies. He also writes that in the future he wants to experiment with creating large area surveys by logging signal strength data against GPS locations to generate a heatmap. If you are interested in that idea, then it is similar to Tim Haven’s driveby noise detector system which also used RTL-SDR dongles, or the heatmap feature in RTLSDR Scanner.
