Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates To Make Others Pay Their Tolls, Tickets (wired.com) 23
Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Wired with the caption: "This story will be an on-going payday for traffic ticket lawyers. I am ordering one now." From the report: Digital license plates, already legal to buy in a growing number of states and to drive with nationwide, offer a few perks over their sheet metal predecessors. You can change their display on the fly to frame your plate number with novelty messages, for instance, or to flag that your car has been stolen. Now one security researcher has shown how they can also be hacked to enable a less benign feature: changing a car's license plate number at will to avoid traffic tickets and tolls -- or even pin them on someone else.
Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to "jailbreak" digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he's able to rewrite a Reviver plate's firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image. That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez points out, could let drivers with the license plates evade any system that depends on license plate numbers for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to speeding and parking tickets to automatic license plate readers that police use to track criminal suspects. "You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to be able to do," says Rodriguez. "Imagine you are going through a speed camera or if you are a criminal and you don't want to get caught."
Worse still, Rodriguez points out that a jailbroken license plate can be changed not just to an arbitrary number but also to the number of another vehicle -- whose driver would then receive the malicious user's tickets and toll bills. "If you can change the license plate number whenever you want, you can cause some real problems," Rodriguez says. All traffic-related mischief aside, Rodriguez also notes that jailbreaking the plates could also allow drivers to use the plates' features without paying Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee. Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates' firmware exists at the hardware level -- in Reviver's chips themselves -- Rodriguez says there's no way for Reviver to patch the issue with a mere software update. Instead, it would have to replace those chips in each display. That means the company's license plates are very likely to remain vulnerable despite Rodriguez's warning -- a fact, Rodriguez says, that transport policymakers and law enforcement should be aware of as digital license plates roll out across the country. "It's a big problem because now you have thousands of licensed plates with this issue, and you would need to change the hardware to fix it," he says.
Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to "jailbreak" digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he's able to rewrite a Reviver plate's firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image. That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez points out, could let drivers with the license plates evade any system that depends on license plate numbers for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to speeding and parking tickets to automatic license plate readers that police use to track criminal suspects. "You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to be able to do," says Rodriguez. "Imagine you are going through a speed camera or if you are a criminal and you don't want to get caught."
Worse still, Rodriguez points out that a jailbroken license plate can be changed not just to an arbitrary number but also to the number of another vehicle -- whose driver would then receive the malicious user's tickets and toll bills. "If you can change the license plate number whenever you want, you can cause some real problems," Rodriguez says. All traffic-related mischief aside, Rodriguez also notes that jailbreaking the plates could also allow drivers to use the plates' features without paying Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee. Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates' firmware exists at the hardware level -- in Reviver's chips themselves -- Rodriguez says there's no way for Reviver to patch the issue with a mere software update. Instead, it would have to replace those chips in each display. That means the company's license plates are very likely to remain vulnerable despite Rodriguez's warning -- a fact, Rodriguez says, that transport policymakers and law enforcement should be aware of as digital license plates roll out across the country. "It's a big problem because now you have thousands of licensed plates with this issue, and you would need to change the hardware to fix it," he says.
Why do we need digital license plates? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:2)
What's wrong with the old metal plates?
Low profit margins.
A metal plate costs $20 one time.
The digital plate costs $29.99 per month. That's $3600 over ten years.
My car is worth less than that.
Re: (Score:2)
Never mind the cost of illuminating the damn things (NOW WITH NEW ELECTRICAL REQUIREMENTS!), or the additional risk of it breaking and getting a ticket because your plate wasn't displaying it's registration. (Or worse, some cop claiming your own car is stolen because the plate wasn't working...) A metal plate has none of these issues.
But some grifter wasn't making enough money so add some electronics to it and charge a new monthly fee. America home of grift, land of the broke.
Attention Gen-Z (Score:1)
Re: (Score:3)
Vanity, thy name is "Sucker!" (Score:1)
It's hard to feel sorry for the people who will be charged with offences they didn't commit. Anybody who pays more money for something which is much more likely to fail in some fashion, just for the sake of vanity or coolness or shits 'n' giggles, deserves what they get.
Also, I wonder if people who "learn to code" as part of mandatory school curricula will be savvy enough to avoid products like this. Somehow, I think most of them WON'T be smart enough. So we're gonna be stuck with this crap going forward, b
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Probably relatively trivial to prove unless their vehicle is a match to your make, model, coloration, and also that they hit tollbooths near your home location. The tollbooths are required by law to send a photo of the offending vehicle with the fee/bill/citation.
The problem is going to be shitty jurisdictions like Texas that require you to come in person to challenge the ticket, rather than sending an electronic response with pertinent information such as "That's a red 1990 Chevy Silverado with a trump s
Re: Vanity, thy name is "Sucker!" (Score:2)
Except the companies operating the tolls do not care and ignore complains and add late fees even when faced with clear evidence.
https://abc7news.com/bayarea-f... [abc7news.com]
Re: (Score:2)
The plates have BTLE and LTE. While the visual display might be hacked, what about it's RF identification? That would
Re: (Score:2)
Remember - only you're smart enough. Everyone else always gets what they deserve. In the future, history will be written like, "Aw man, I wish we had more smart people like jenningsthecat around! So smart!"
Re: (Score:2)
what the hell were DMVs thinking that they allowed these plates to be used without having first had the devices vetted by somebody who specializes in security?
$
Re: (Score:2)
Also, what the hell were DMVs thinking
Boss demanded more profits, and if I don't give him those profits by pushing our new subscription service he'll find someone (or some BOT) that will. Society can get fucked.
Do these folks consume so little news that they're unaware of the almost daily stories of
You're asking that after multiple stories of idiots across the country thinking Biden was still the Democratic nominee on Election Day? Or the multiple stories of idiots across the country voting for Trump thinking he wasn't going to do what he said he would?
$500 digital plates! (Score:3)
$500 could buy a lot of fake physical license plates. Or probably even quite a few sets of license-plate-sized e-ink displays that don't need jailbreaking.
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
IF you put it into a digital system... (Score:1)
How can you tell a legit (Score:1)
Can you, or a passing policeman, tell a legitimate digital license plate from something someone whipped up or bought from AliExpress?
I mean, why bother jailbreaking those if you can just use a substitute?
Changeable license plate (Score:4, Interesting)
I seem to recall there was an Aston Martin back in the 60's that had that feature.
It had a few other features too - machine guns, ejector seat...
Where to start.... (Score:2)
There are so many WTFs in this story it's hard to know where to start...
o What problem were digital license plates designed to solve?
o Who in their right mind would pay $29/month for a frickin' license plate??
o Who in authority never even once wondered "Hmm... are license plates that can change what they display really a good idea?"
Given the track record of politicians, I expect many stories over the next few years about people whose lives were made a Kafkaesque misery by aggressive DMVs going after