CAN bus theft

[Arde]

I was a lowly engineer when Robert Bosch folks came up to us at Intel with the CAN bus protocol, and we gave them some feedback as networking people...They told us that BMW would use it, but that Mercedes was so conservative that it would be decades before they are convinced that it works reliably, and adopt it. Mercedes adopted it, and now cars are being stolen through the CAN bus connector at the headlights...

Thieves are now stealing cars via a headlight 'CAN injection'

Car thieves have come up with yet another way to steal your car, and this one is rather creative.

www.yahoo.com

Conservative is a person like me that brings 12V to headlights, but not a communications bus!
Smart bulbs? Give me a break.

 

[Ohmess]

I was a lowly engineer when Robert Bosch folks came up to us at Intel with the CAN bus protocol, and we gave them some feedback as networking people...They told us that BMW would use it, but that Mercedes was so conservative that it would be decades before they are convinced that it works reliably, and adopt it. Mercedes adopted it, and now cars are being stolen through the CAN bus connector at the headlights...

Thieves are now stealing cars via a headlight 'CAN injection'

Car thieves have come up with yet another way to steal your car, and this one is rather creative.

www.yahoo.com

Conservative is a person like me that brings 12V to headlights, but not a communications bus!
Smart bulbs? Give me a break.

Oddly enough, one of the reasons we have smart bulbs and complex lighting assemblies is that lighting is one of the few areas where auto manufacturers have been able to hold off federal regulations. Auto makers argued (rightly in my view) that the feds left them with very few areas in which they could distinguish their designs, and the feds didn't really have a good counter argument.

 

[Arde]

Oddly enough, one of the reasons we have smart bulbs and complex lighting assemblies is that lighting is one of the few areas where auto manufacturers have been able to hold off federal regulations. Auto makers argued (rightly in my view) that the feds left them with very few areas in which they could distinguish their designs, and the feds didn't really have a good counter argument.

Interesting.

 

[bmw2800cs]

Just got caught up - so there is a data bus called the "Can bus" which in Mercedes runs to the headlights (and other places I assume), I assume to do fancy stuff like different levels of brightness, frequency etc and there is a way to hack it to start the car?

 

[Norm!]

My two modern BMWs have the Full Adaptive LED Lighting package. They self level the headlight beam, the beam turns into corners and the high beams momentarily turn off automatically when a car is approaching. Europe lets the system only turn off the pixels pointing at the light source which is safer for the BMW driver. I love these systems for dark mountain road drives which I do fairly often with a cabin in the mountains. Definitely not just a light bulb!

 

[x_atlas0]

Yeah, after they made lighting an active element, it lives on CAN. You can then inject CAN commands to the vehicle. However, most automakers have separate CANs for major elements, with limited cross-talk. So, for example, most cars wouldn't let you start the engine, because the body CAN isn't tied to the powertrain CAN. However, the body CAN usually controls the doors, among other things, then letting the intruder have internal physical access.

More modern cars do have internal security within CAN to prevent unauthorized message intrusion via 2-part keys.