Tagged: car key

Explaining and Demonstrating Jam and Replay Attacks on Keyless Entry Systems with RTL-SDR, RPiTX and a Yardstick One

Thank you to Christopher for submitting to us an article that he's written for a project of his that demonstrates how vulnerable vehicle keyless entry systems are to jam and replay attacks. In the article he explains what a jam and replay attack is, the different types of keyless entry security protocols, and how an attack can be performed with low cost off the shelf hardware. He explains a jam and replay attack as follows:

The attacker utilises a device with full-duplex RF capabilities (simultaneous transmit and receive) to produce a jamming signal, in order to prevent the car from receiving the valid code from the key fob. This is possible as RKEs are often designed with a receive band that is wider than the bandwidth of the key fob signal (refer Figure 3, right). The device simultaneously intercepts the rolling code by using a tighter receive band, and stores it for later use. When the user presses the key fob again, the device captures the second code, and transmits the first code, so that the user’s required action is performed (lock or unlock) (Kamkar, 2015). This results in the attacker possessing the next valid rolling code, providing them with access to the vehicle. The process can be repeated indefinitely by placing the device in the vicinity of the car. Note that if the user unlocks the car using the mechanical key after the first try, the second code capture is not required, and the first code can be used to unlock the vehicle.

In his demonstrating the attack he uses the RTL-SDR to initially find the frequency that they keyfob operates at and to analyze the signal and determine some of it's properties. He then uses a Raspberry Pi running RPiTX to generate a jamming signal, and the YardStick One to capture and replay the car keyfob signal.

Jam and Replay Hardware: Raspberry Pi running RpiTX for the Jamming and a Yardstick One for Capture and Replay.
Jam and Replay Hardware: Raspberry Pi running RpiTX for the Jamming and a Yardstick One for Capture and Replay.

HackRF Receives Negative Press in the UK’s ‘DailyMail’ Newspaper

The HackRF is a $300 USD RX/TX capable software defined radio which has a wide tuning range from almost DC – 6 GHz, and wide bandwidths of up to 20 MHz. It uses an 8-bit ADC so reception quality is not great, but most people buy it for its TX and wide frequency/bandwidth capabilities.

Recently the HackRF received some negative press in the ‘Daily Mail’, a British tabloid newspaper famous for sensationalist articles. In the article the Daily Mail show that the HackRF can be used to break into £100,000 Range Rover car in less than two minutes. The exact method of attack isn’t revealed, but we assume they did some sort of simple replay attack. What they probably did is take the car key far away out of reception range from the car, record a key press using the HackRF, and then replay that key press close to the car with the HackRF’s TX function. Taking the key out of reception range of the car prevents the car from invalidating the rolling code when the key is pressed. 

Of course in real life an attacker would need to be more sophisticated as they most likely wouldn’t have access to the keyfob, and in that case they would most likely perform a jam-record-replay attack as we’ve seen with cheap homemade devices like RollJam. The HackRF cannot do this by itself because it is only half-duplex and so cannot TX and RX at the same time.

We should also mention that the HackRF is not the only device that can be used for replay attacks – potentially any radio that can transmit at the keyfob frequency could be used. Even a very cheap Arduino with ISM band RF module can be used for the same purpose.

Analyzing a Car Security Active RFID Token with a HackRF

Some car security systems from around 2001 – 2003 use an embedded RFID tag inside the car key as an added security measure against key copying. Using his HackRF, ChiefTinker was able to analyse and decode the data from an active RFID token used in a car key. He notes that the same analysis could also be performed with an RTL-SDR dongle.

Upon powering the RFID tag with a power supply, ChiefTinker noticed that the tag emitted a short transmission every 5 seconds in the ISM band at 433.920 MHz. On closer inspection he determined that the transmitted data was encoded with a simple AM on-off keying (OOK) scheme. After importing the audio into Audacity and cleaning up the signal a little, he was able to clearly see the OOK square wave showing the transmitted binary data.

Next he analysed the data and compared the binary output against two different RFID keys. From the comparison he was able to determine that the tag simply beacons a unique serial number, which is susceptible to capture and replay attacks. After further processing he was able to convert the transmitted binary serial number into hexadecimal, then ASCII to find the unique serial number being broadcast in decimal.

RFID Car Key Tokens
RFID Car Key Tokens