It is still too easy to steal cars equipped with an opening system based on contactless keys, warns the ADAC, a German automobile club.
Contactless keys are very practical: no need to take them out of your pocket, they activate the opening of the car doors very easily. Too easily? This is the alarming finding of the ADAC, a German automobile club, which tested 500 models supplied with this type of key. The result is chilling: most of them can be hacked.
Manufacturers in no hurry to integrate the only effective solution
And it doesn’t take much for a thief to take possession of the contents of a vehicle, or even the car itself. You have to equip yourself with a Wi-Fi range extender, boxes sold for a few tens of euros. The thief must stand close to the owner of the vehicle, for example when he is in a café, to pick up and send the radio signals produced by the key.
An accomplice positioned right next to the car just has to wait for the signal to reach his receiver box. He can then take possession of the vehicle… The radio signals can thus extend over hundreds of meters. And it works even when the key is in the owner’s house, as long as the thief is close enough to hook the signal.
For the motorist, there are fortunately countermeasures such as cases that block radio waves. But this protection reduces the practical aspect of the contactless key, since it must be placed as close as possible to the car (and therefore taken out of the pocket) for it to open the door or the trunk. This cancels all the interest of such an accessory.
The real solution put forward by the ADAC is the integration of a UWB chip (ultra-wideband), which allows the key and the car to locate each other much more precisely. The signals emitted by the key thus go less in all directions and are therefore less likely to be hacked. Unfortunately, the UWB is still very far from being democratized: only 24 models out of the 500 tested by the German club are equipped with it…
