Cracked in 60 Seconds
The second technique that the researchers plan to reveal at Usenix attacks a cryptographic scheme called HiTag2, which is decades old but still used in millions of vehicles. For that attack they didn’t need to extract any keys from a car’s internal components. Instead, a hacker would have to use a radio setup similar to the one used in the Volkswagen hack to intercept eight of the codes from the driver’s key fob, which in modern vehicles includes one rolling code number that changes unpredictably with every button press. (To speed up the process, they suggest that their radio equipment could be programmed to jam the driver’s key fob repeatedly, so that he or she would repeatedly press the button, allowing the attacker to quickly record multiple codes.)