Another worry reprised

Following the worries aired at reference 1, I was interested to read about a spate of car thefts in Chelsea, thefts which were enabled with a £50 gadget that you can buy on the internet. A gadget which, it seems, lets you break into high end cars - beamers and the like - with no bother at all.

I suppose that such car have fob action locks, with the fob sending and receiving appropriate radio signals from the lock on the car. But the dealer has to be able to get into the car for you if you lose your fob, so he is able to interrogate the lock with his manufacturer supplied gadget. The tricky bit is how does the lock know that the gadget it is talking to is OK?

Maybe the people who work for beamer were on a bit of a tight budget and could not go in for the sort of proper checking that banks go in for before they allow online access. So they just put a magic number into the lock and provided the gadget knows the magic number it is allowed in.

But how do you stop the bad people stealing the magic number if, for example, they manage to borrow a gadget for a little while? Maybe you encrypt it, but then you have to give the gadget another magic number to do that.

Another angle is that the manufacturer would need to be able to disable gadgets which have been stolen. So that, before the gadget is allowed to do anything at all it has to log into the central bunker to check that it is still OK and has not been reported mislaid, missing or stolen.

 And so it goes on. There are answers to all this, but it all costs.

Perhaps buyers of high end cars are going to have to ask for certificates of security worthiness, only obtainable after serious people have tried seriously hard to break the systems concerned. So, in the round, the bad people are adding to the costs of living of all the rest of us. Not a victim free crime at all, even if we don't count the people with the high end cars.

Reference 1:  http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/another-worry.html.