Category Archives: Cars Technica

Cars Technica, wireless charging

UK to test roads that recharge cars as they drive

Electric vehicles (EVs) have a lot going for them, but long charging times are still a barrier to adoption for many consumers. This is understandable—society has been conditioned for the last 100 years to think of a car as something that you can refuel in a few minutes. Even the fastest DC fast chargers still take almost half an hour to recharge an EV. What’s more, the laws of physics get involved at some point, limiting the rate at which you can charge a battery before things start to get messy. The answer to impatient drivers needing a recharge may well be special roads that can power up a car on the move, F-Zero style. This week, the UK government announced that it wants to begin testing this tech, and soon.

Wireless recharging isn’t that outlandish a concept, as anyone with an electric toothbrush may well know. Plenty of smartphones also use wireless charging, and we’ve covered Qualcomm’s Halo tech that the company has been demonstrating with a BMW i8 hybrid that travels with the FIA Formula E Championship. The Halo system is designed to charge a car when it’s stationary, but Qualcomm’s Graeme Davison told us that it should be adaptable to low-speed recharging relatively easily.

Meanwhile, South Korea has already been testing a wireless road charging system in the town of Gumi on a special 7.5 mile (12km) stretch of road that powers up special buses. The UK announcement is for off-road trials for now (as in, not on public roads as opposed to dirt tracks) and is looking for bids from contractors wanting to develop the test infrastructure. In a press release, UK Transport Minister Andrew Jones said, “The government is already committing £500 million over the next five years to keep Britain at the forefront of this technology, which will help boost jobs and growth in the sector. As this study shows, we continue to explore options on how to improve journeys and make low-emission vehicles accessible to families and businesses.”

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Cars Technica, Risk Assessment

OwnStar Wi-Fi attack now grabs BMW, Mercedes, and Chrysler cars’ virtual keys

Remember OwnStar? Earlier this month, security researcher and NSA Playset contributor Samy Kamkar demonstrated a Wi-Fi based attack that allowed his device to intercept OnStar credentials from the RemoteLink mobile application—giving an attacker the ability to clone them and use them to track, unlock, and even remote start the vehicle. Kamkar discussed the details of the attack last Friday at DEF CON in Las Vegas, noting that the RemoteLink app on iOS devices had failed to properly check the certificate for a secure connection to OnStar’s server, or—as is more common in mobile apps using HTTPS to access Web services—use a “pinned” certificate hard-coded into the application itself. OnStar quickly resolved the issue with a RemoteLink app update.

But OwnStar has moved on to other targets. Today, Kamkar announced that he had adapted the tool to target applications for BMW Remote, Mercedes-Benz mbrace, and Chrysler’s Uconnect services on Apple iOS devices. All three, he said in an exchange with Ars via Twitter, have the exact same vulnerability as the RemoteLink app did: “no pinned cert or even PKI/[certificate authority] validation. Trivial to attack an unadulterated mobile device.”

The OwnStar device packs all the components required to execute this attack into a portable case that can be placed near a targeted vehicle. Like a virtual bear trap, it can capture the login credentials of a car owner using a mobile app to remotely unlock, lock, or start the vehicle, which can then be loaded onto a copy of the targeted mobile app on the attacker’s own device—giving the attacker the ability to execute all of the functions of the telematics system on the targeted vehicle. And it’s all because of a flaw that is all too common to mobile applications—reliance on a remote server’s certificate being valid, regardless of what network the connection is over.

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