Remote View

1mo ago

Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

www.wired.com Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

Digital license plates sold by Reviver, already legal to buy in some states and drive with nationwide, can be hacked by their owners to evade traffic regulations or even law enforcement surveillance.

Yet another case of just because you can...

Internet of Shit @suppo.fi

Bezier @suppo.fi

1mo ago

Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

www.wired.com /story/digital-license-plate-jailbreak-hack/

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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ @lemmy.dbzer0.com

Cephalotrocity @biglemmowski.win

1mo ago

Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets

www.wired.com /story/digital-license-plate-jailbreak-hack/

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26 comments

A subscription fee for a fucking license plate? We already have that, it's called registration.

That's the only reason I can think you'd want a digital license plate, to change it on demand.
Its just e-waste.

Digital license plate
I understand the words, but the phrase makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
- Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee.
  Someone, somewhere is making money on these and probably providing ~~kickbacks~~ campaign contributions to get laws passed to allow this sort of stupid.
- Seriously. I see exactly one use case, and that's for criminals of one sort or another to mask their identity during the commission of a crime. It's not like law abiding citizens are able to use them to protect their privacy in any way.
  It's not like digital IDs, where it's one less thing to carry and potentially more secure. Your plate or this plate are fixed to your car the same way, both are (legally) static, and the only thing that changes is the ease of faking your plate.

If you thought digital licence plates were a good idea I have a digital bridge to sell you

What is the point of a digital license plate anyways?
- So a cop can remotely disable your plate, then finr you for not having a plate.
  Easy revenue!
- If it can malfunction, it can be replaced.
  Replacement costs money.
  The spice must flow.
  
  It's a subscription at 29.99 a month so.....
- It's right there in the article:
  Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee.
  What, you thought this was supposed to help the customer?

Yes one digital license plate please! Also scan my fucking face so I can by a 300 dollar concert ticket you assholes!

Imagine a digital plate being a vulnerability. I'm shocked.
You can also 3D print a regular plate, but at least that doesn't change on demand.

Where I live, I see tons of cars every day with fake, missing, invalid, and foreign license plates every day. Enforcement would require cops to get out of their cars and expend effort over an administrative violation, so nothing happens.
These plates are "illegal"? Meh.
- Where I live, a shockingly high percentage of the fake, invalid, obscured license plates are the cops themselves.

“this scenario is highly unlikely to occur in real-world conditions, limiting it to individual bad actors knowingly violating laws and product warranties.”
From reading this article, it looks like they just accessed the JTAG or SWDIO connector and simply wrote a new software on that thingy. If they were stupid enough to expose this kind of connector, they probably were dumb enough not even to secure it against reading, so one could probably just reverse engineer. I think I could easily do that if I had access to such a thing and would set my mind to it. It is not different from what I do every day for a job - programming such embedded devices.
I've been in places where people with this kind of knowledge meet by the thousands. I would not call this "highly unlikely".

Not everything needs to be digital FFS!!!

Why even look at the numbers at all? Just make it a meshtastic thing that you hook up to the car's battery. Or maybe a AAA battery thing that is solar powdered and you stick it to your windshield.
- Because the primary reader of a car's identity is still visual, be it by eye or by camera. Swapping out every plate camera (arguments against scanners notwithstanding) and making it impossible for humans to read plates sounds very destructive at this time.
  Anecdotal inconvenience: Teslas have a high rate of vanity plates in my area. I suspect it's because they park in the same places and owners can't tell them apart with 2 common models (3 and X) and 4 total colors (white, red, blue, black). Holding the fob is not something people do with touch/proximity unlock

Archived version: https://archive.is/wvXV8/again?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wired.com%2Fstory%2Fdigital-license-plate-jailbreak-hack%2F

Everything that disrupts surveillance is good. People concerned with the "fairness" of tolls and tickets, or that a criminal might benefit are just grown-ass hall-monitors and it's pathetic.
- I disagree on this case. Disrupting surveillance blending unpaid tolls into society is one thing, but this doubles as identity theft with the burden placed on one innocent individual. It's not victimless in the sense a thief makes off with a few dollars saved like an obscured plate, it puts the accusation on a specific different person. They then have the legal trouble to deal with individually. This is something that should be as secure as a standard physical plate (which isn't truly that secure at all).
  
  Yeah, it would be like committing crimes while fooling facial recognition to identify you as a random innocent person instead of just identifying no one.
  I guess in the long run it could erode confidence in the system (I know it already misidentifies people regularly) but in the short term, innocents would suffer.
  
  Yeah, there have been cases of people dealing with the bureaucratic nightmare that followed when they got vanity license plates that said "NULL" and a bunch of bad program logic combined with incomplete data in the databases to send them a bunch of tickets.
  Making it so that people can take advantage of even more complex computer errors could ruin things for other people.
  
  I heard somebody mention you find out what the license plate of a police officer is and put it on them so that they're the one that has to deal with the legal repercussions so that they will learn either that or they're very close family.
- I agree. I'm totally down for anything that makes surveillance of the population harder. And if this fucks with automatic license plate readers and shit like that, I am totally all for it.

26 comments