UKC

Yep, Van Stolen, SX65AEG Red VW Caddy from Telford. If you see it call the police. Insurance involved, things will be sorted - in time. Stuff in the van will be replaced.

The general point of the post is how can a vehicle disappear off this planet leaving no trace AND Police are looking for it using ANPR (Much more productive than sending bobbies looking for it) but as far as they are concerned the case is closed. Crime number given. End of. Insurance will pay up, I'll purchase a new vehicle from the dealer or open market. This process is just keeping the wheel spinning, some are making money, us poor punters are out of pocket. 

Why is this acceptable?

What are the solutions?

Thanks for letting me get this off my chest. I'm number 69 in the queue to speak to the insurers, I may be here some time  

Robin

Did they have the keys? 

My insurers demanded that I installed a tracker..... But apparently most van thieves are capable of defeating them. 

If it's staying in the UK and on the roads they ill have slapped false plates on it making ANPR useless. If they want to sell it as a workable van then they'll change the vin number to a knackered cheap beat up van, making it a completely different van as far as paper work is concerned.

If it's being broken for parts or sold aboard then it will be straight in a box truck and won't see the light of day again unless it's in bits or in another country.

If the thieves have half a brain then the police don't stand a chance.

You can by a blocker on Ebay for next to nothing. 

There is a SPOT tracker, switched off, in the Van. I keep looking to see if they are stupid enough to switch it on.

Next van, fit 2 trackers, an obvious sacrificial one and a second concealed away somewhere.

Next van, add some concealed security so that it can't be started or driven away, even with the key.

Concealed cut-out switch somewhere under the dash or disconnect something in the engine bay, such as the starter motor.

It's not.

We need a large and powerful market regulator forcing manufacturers to make stolen vehicles technically impossible or at least hideously painful to take, use, register/transfer, own and maintain. Then you're just left with people stealing for scrap and mechanical parts.

Every single electronic module in a vehicle can be indelibly and robustly serialised and logged on a database. Stolen vehicles then become fingerprinted, all but impossible to completely disguise when they bump into national or border bureaucracy or the maintenance network. At least until the fingerprints or database access are stolen or bought!

As you say, each theft is a new sale or some helpful movement in the legit 2nd hand market. Manufacturers have little real incentive to address the problem in anything more than the most superficially reassuring manner.

jk

How is stuff like this legal?

Depending how it works it's probably not. But who's checking? Even when an illegal product recognised and is stopped at the point of sale or border, nobody has the resources to follow all but the most taboo stuff (firearms for example) back to source.

There's also a good chance much of this stuff is the modern equivalent of the novelty golf ball detector, it does nothing but you only find that out when you metaphorically step on the IED.

jk

It's not, their use and sale is illegal in the UK. Not that eBay seem to care.

https://www.approvedindex.co.uk/vehicle-tracking/gps-jammers-legal

But you can legally buy one which is weird. Write to your MP.

Apparently if you track a vehicle by hiding a phone with a sim and data connection (obviously wired up so it's always charging) then this can't be blocked by simple GPS jammers as it's being tracked by it's data connection instead. It's less accurate however.

I'd imagine the scroat who nicked it might have such technology. But at some point they will park it up and fork off. They wont leave the blocker on it for ever.

Many cars already have network connectivity, if your airbags go off it calls 999, or for traffic updates. It shouldn't be beyond reason to use those, and remote disable. As everything is connected to the CAM bus, you could send a kill signal that bricks all those components. Manufacturers make another sale every time a vehicle is nicked. Its not in their best interests to make it hard.

This is a terrible idea. What if the car thinks it's being stolen but isn't. Happens all the time.

They will leave it it long enough to strip the car. Detector would be discovered by this point and turned off using a big brick.

If selling abroad, they would keep it indoors until a tracker is found. They'll find it eventually.

I like the idea of every electronic component being traceable and people have access to items that belong to a stolen car.

That takes me back decades! My first car, back when security was minimal, I fitted a inline switch in the engine bay to isolate the starter motor. Back then the wires under the steering wheel were all exposed and even I could jump start the car in seconds.
I only actually used it if I felt the need, say, when I parked up for a week or two when going on holiday. It really was just a delaying tactic even though the switch was hidden.

Probably cost £40 to defeat it, unless you are actually going to physically dismantle each module to interrogate the processor then the read-out is easily modified, anywhere between the OBD port and the Can bus will do. Our service module just plugs in to the port and we can select what vehicle it should appear to be and I know we can change the engine and gearbox numbers because we have done it. Changing the VIN should be just as easy.

Because your vehicle's various networks, parts and interfaces have not been built with security in mind, that's a choice. I'm sure any practical implementation could be defeated with enough resource but as I say, make it hideously painful rather than slightly tricky and you'll get rid of the majority of semi-opportunist low-middle value thefts.

I suspect the reality is most modern cars get stolen using the key, that's very hard to stop. You need to crush the value of stolen cars if you want to stop the thefts/robberies.

jk

Similar reason to this, perhaps...?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-62722082

You have a human initiate the kill signal.

Its the same technology as with mobile phones you can block the ESN from appearing on a mobile operators network. The same as with HTTPS certificates, there are global certificate revocation lists, your browser checks them each time you go to a https page. Or newer Apple phones. The parts are serialised and will only work in one device. A pain for repairers who used stolen phone parts to repair broken phones.

But if you wanted to go down the route or reinitialising a bricked car, then you'd use your phone as a multi factor authentication device for resetting. You'd ned to be in proximity of your car, you have biometric in the the form of faceid or fingerprint and a passcode. To unbrick it, you'd install a new x509 certificate, issued by your manufacturer. Same as you use subordinate certs from a trusted certificate authority on web pages. 'But wont the bad guys forge the certificate?' If they could they could rob banks with less hassle than stealing a car.

Because 4g doesnt work indoors?

As for uniquely numbed car components, then some sort of distributed global ledger would need to be invented...

Some problems can be solved, its just that it takes more than 10s of thought to do so. And the will to do it. As it stands now, you can use bits from a breakers yard, if your mate has a laptop and cable.

Now, I would chat, but there is a Russian bloke with a tractor stolen from Ukraine, that wont start...

Minor nitpick: IMEI, not ESN. At least in this country.

Also the CA model for HTTPS (TLS) has plenty of huge scary flaws, but it seems to work well enough for now at least.

It has always baffled me that these type of loss prevention systems have been set up for phones for decades (well, at least one) and yet the auto industry still lags behind despite the value of their product. 

Ah, so you don't mean bricked then. If something is bricked it's damaged beyond repair. You mean the temporarily disabled. Which could work, for a while, but it won't be long before those systems are cracked and can be flashed with working factory settings.

I have a MK2 range rover so do something similar on a regular basis. Actuality what I do isn't quite the same, but it can be done.

Ok, it could be made more difficult to sell on through a remote kill, but if a system can be made, it can be broken. It's more a question of long it takes.

Well you wouldn't get GPS and location through 4g alone is pretty vague. I guess you might get it down to a handful of streets but good luck asking to inspect all their garages.

Well if you didnt want a £50K paper weight, you would realistically have a way to unbrick it. If you can find a way to imitate a certificate authority on the net, you'd have a lucrative career. Either as a bank robber or in a government agency cracking codes. Providing the certificate is signed by the master certificate, you can issue a new cert and still maintain the chain of trust. Plus you have the advantage of signing a cert that can only be used by a certain device, so it would be tied to the hardware of that vehicle.

Indeed. You remove all the scroats and smackheads from the realm of car theft. The only people who can realistically steal you car are cypher punks and geeks.

Tracker blockers definitely work. L our vans are tracked for both security and Job scheduling. The software is set up so that during working hours we can see the vans, out of hours we can't but if its stolen I and only I can log in and override the privacy settings and see its location in real time. 

One of our guys decided he didn't trust this and got a tracker blocker to use out of hours. I didn't know this because I had no reason to look out of hours but he often forgot to turn it off during working hours. I had the company that installed them out 4 or 5 times looking for the intermittent fault, they even changed the entire unit before he came clean. 

It's a device that plugs in to the cigarette lighter, turns out that he was leaving it plugged in every night and all weekend. I had to explain to him that if our insurance found out they wouldn't pay out and if I caught him using it again it would be a written warning. 

It’s proper frustrating but given we can’t sort out the approximately 1 million uninsured vehicles - you’d think a much simpler challenge - I don’t have much confidence in things changing.

I didn't mean to give the impression they can't work, just that when you're buying illegal electronics from the internet it's a lottery what you actually get, especially something you can't easily test.

jk

I'm not saying it can't be done, I'm just very very doubtful.

Certification works well for databases and phones, because you don't have physical access to the data you are trying to retrieve. So when a ESN is blocked, you would need to hack that database to unblock it.

With a car, you have physical access to everything that it needs to run. So you wouldn't need to hack any database and replicate a certificate as you mention. You just need to change the code in the EPROM (or whatever the correct terminology is these days) so it doesn't look for anything security related.

I don't know how to interpret HEX and figure out the binary structure etc, but plenty people seem to do it because lot of cars have been "unlocked" in a similar fashion.

I do find these people less threatening so that would be a silver lining but unfortunately once the security systems have been cracked (almost always by enthusiasts who just want to modify their cars), it can then just be a matter of plugging a ebay special into the OBD2 port and off you go. Although, more recently I've found you need to connect to the chip by opening the ECU up which adds a tricky extra step. But I can't see how they can ever stop you doing that. I guess they could make the ECU's really hard to open.

Even if the system was so complicated nobody could figure out how to crack it, there's nothing stopping you getting an engine running with £100 worth of Speeduino.

There was a great story of this with Russia stealing a load of Ukrainian farm great and shipping it to Chechnya. 

https://www.theregister.com/2022/05/02/ukrainian_tractors_deere/

Cars are increasingly moving more to 'vehicle as a service' approach and are increasingly useless without software and connectivity but this then deprives owners of the ability to fix it themselves and we are then increasingly dependent on the manufacturer (and hoping they stay in business). I think John Deere are actually being challenged in court in the US because some farmers are unable to make even minor fixes and modifications to their increasingly complicated equipment. 

Even if I wanted to, there's nothing I could do to my car apart from fill up the washer fluid and change the tyres. I'm happy with that approach but I can see potential downsides. 

This new trend is crazy. The whole BMW thing were you have to pay a monthly subscription to use the heated seats. Madness.

I tend to buy cars that are 10 to 25 years old so hasn't affected me yet, but if it ever does I'll be sure to add my own relay box and run wires to things like heating elements. It's dumb equipment at the end of the day, all it needs it power.

The John Deere system was cracked in 2017 and the software and adaptors readily available, you can replace the entire operating system with open source programs.

The dispute with John Deere is that the US government removed copyright protection for the software in 2015 to allow anyone access to the codes (and JD required to make the system available to everyone) so they changed to the customer was required to sign a user agreement instead.

Since all the fixes come from the Ukraine and Russia anyway the idea that the bootied tractors became inert junk is laughable.

I think it's just one of those things that seems counter intuitive at first glance. The BMW example isn't really controversial since you're in theory not paying for the heated seats up front - it's just like buying the car without the option but you can change your mind later. I can buy a 'performance boost' on my car to improve the 0-60 time but there's no physical change involved to the vehicle, it's just software. I'm ok with that and don't feel like I've been deprived of anything. 

You don't have to pay a subscription to use the seat heating, you can just order them as usual. The customers choice.

I think you are the exception. It's appalling marketing and would turn me right off buying. 

Sure, you can swap out the ECU and the myriad other computers, right the way down to each of the sensors, actuators, lighting modules, all of which are networked for aftermarket parts and you might well get it running, maybe even get some entertainment and nice features back up but at a ludicrous cost and not back to normal, saleable to normal unsuspecting people. Plus it can no longer be maintained by legit companies if it lacks the features which prove its provenance. You don't have to make it impossible to get rolling again to destroy its resale value, you just need to make doing so difficult, expensive and obvious.

And that's fine for a joyride but no good for a resale.

jk

Software enabled cost options are just a modern reality. Keeping them available to the secondary market makes that obvious but it is anyway. I agree that renting features out is terrible marketing! I'd be surprised if that becomes a norm but maybe I'm out of touch.

jk

I'm not convinced that this is legally enforceable, a least in the second-hand market.  If you buy a BMW from a private individual, and don't accept any restrictive T&Cs that say you accept BMW's right to charge you for using the heated seats with which the car is fitted, I can't see any way they can stop you getting them connected up so they work. 

I suspect there will be no shortage of garages with the ability to plug and fix this within seconds.  It might take a little longer for someone to legally challenge BMW for attempting reach through to consumers with whom it has no contract.  In fact, it positively invites new buyers to immediately sell their car to a family member and get them to switch on all the premium extras.    

No matter how many ‘glances’ I take it doesn’t get any better. If it’s cheaper for them just to fit heated seats to all their cars then they should offer them in a trim levels where that it the case. Shipping a car with a physical part and then not allowing access to it is bonkers. Would be like having a spare wheel that you had to pay extra to unlock! 
 

Yes you do

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-62142208

In the IT world you can often buy network gear, such as switches, which have 24 (or more) physical ports on the device. But only half of them work. You then go to cisco, to get a licence to unlock the others. I presume it gives the them a saving when manufacturing, as they dont have to produce multiple hardware units that are very similar. The customer has the option of upgrading at a later date as their needs grow.

My views, however, as similar to yours.

You might be doing this already without knowing it. Stuff out of the factory can sometimes have features 'crippled' and sold cheaper - they used to do this with Intel chips years back (DX/SX I think) where they were all built with a maths coprocessor but then on the cheaper chips it was deliberately deactivated. Cheaper than making two separate chips and you get to sell to someone who might not be otherwise in the price bracket for a more expensive product. Better than no sale.

I'm not quite sure what you mean but the point is that building different trim levels, names, combinations etc then it becomes more expensive. As a consumer I prefer it to be simple. Sell me a car and let me buy the features I need - I don't want to fanny around combining the sport pack, comfort pack etc to try to get the what I want.

A construction company I once worked for had a digger stolen which was fitted with a tracker. The 'tracker company' informed them and the Police where the digger was parked up. Not a little surprised when the Police said they were unwilling to recover the digger as it was on a gypsy site! Needless to say a significant crew of construction workers put the gates in and repossessed the digger without anyone leaving a caravan

Physically and legally I'm sure they can't. If you want them to work nicely though you'll want to go through the car's user interface which presumably is encrypted so as to make that tricky without authorised tools and or secure unlocking tokens.

Maybe. BMW may have leant on their engineers to rush the implementation but everyone will have understood the need for chargeable features to be secured by design.

jk

I guess this is the point, these features used to be optional extras as it was an added cost for the manufacturer in terms of parts and factory time (e.g. difference between electric and wind up windows). If it’s now cheaper for manufacturers just to whack all of these additional parts into all the models due to the way mass production functions, why should consumers have to pay more for them? 

It was never (fully) about the cost of production plus a bit of profit. It's marketing. Desirability,  especially with cars. You make a basic version in white that is cheap (relatively). But who wants a white car? Well some people will be willing to just get the basic because cost is the overriding concern. Other people have a bit more disposable cash so an extra 2k to get a nice colour plus a bit more for some extras and base list price soon creeps up out of proportion to the marginal cost of production.

This way as a brand you get to sell basic models to cost conscious people who would otherwise go elsewhere, and get to make more money off people who want extra features (plus potential cachet that goes with it).

NO YOU DON'T! As even in the item you linked says to the customer can make a single payment (i.e tick heated seats in the order) and they work forever.

I miss understood your message. Apologies. I thought you we're saying you can't subscribe for heated seats, you can only buy them as a one off.

I do find the optional extra via a one off payment almost equally annoying. You've already paid for the hardware, and you now have to pay again to use it. Doesn't really matter if it's a one off payment or an ongoing one.

I'm less bothered by paying for software upgrades, it's when software locks you out of hardware you own it bothers me.

If it's cheaper to give everyone heated seats, then just make it standard and maybe customers will take very kindly to that.

There is actually a new rule regarding vehicle data security which became mandatory for the EU in July. Primarily it is concerned with others taking over a vehicle but also impinges on other security aspects.

In theory the 100's of ECU's in a car all have a secure identity from the manufacturer then the vehicle assembler then recodes this with a random number aligned to the individual vehicle.

The gaping hole (regarding theft) is the vehicle manufacturer also needs access to be able to reprogram the ECU or change the identity of the unit if it must be replaced. That is the mechanics can get a code to allow them full access to the identification databank in the vehicle and you can in fact change them as well. In theory only an authorised mechanic can get a one-time code allowing them to change a specific component, in reality one can obtain either an in-between unit which changes the wrong i.d. into the correct one or a software fix.

We tried it this afternoon, you can change a McCormick 200EX into a Landini 110 in minutes according to the OBD readout and for the fun we changed my Ford Galaxy into a 20 ton Zeppelin excavator. Naturally my friend is an honest McCormick main dealer and would never dream of increasing the engine power or upgrading from 40km/hr to 50.

The AdBlue sytem used on diesel engins is naturally completely secure by design, that is the law. A jumper plug costs €25.

The only way to make stolen vehicles worthless would be stamp every single part with a VIN but that just moves the market to less stringent countries. Ones stolen van is dismantled and exported within 24hours.

Imagine my disappointment at finding out this thread wasn't about the latest Dutch cycling prodigy.