'War Texting' Attack Hacks Car Alarm System

It took researcher Don Bailey a mere two hours to successfully hack into a popular car alarm system and start the car remotely by sending it a message.

Bailey, a security consultant with iSec Partners, next week at Black Hat USA in Las Vegas plans to show a video of the car alarm attack he and fellow researcher Mat Solnik conducted. His Black Hat presentation is called "War Texting: Identifying and Interacting with Devices on the Telephone Network."

Physical security systems attached to the GSM and cellular networks, such as GPS tracking devices and car alarms, as well as traffic control systems, home control and automation systems, and SCADA sensors, are ripe for attack, according to Bailey.

War texting is something that Bailey demonstrated earlier this year with personal GPS locators. He demonstrated how to hack vendor Zoombak's personal GPS devices to find, target, and impersonate the user or equipment rigged with those consumer-focused devices. Those low-cost embedded tracking devices in smartphones or those personal GPS devices that track the whereabouts of your children, car, pet, or shipment can easily be intercepted by hackers, who can then pinpoint their whereabouts, impersonate them, and spoof their physical location, he says.

His Black Hat research, meanwhile, focuses more on the infrastructure, as well as on fingerprinting or classifying these devices among millions of wireless phone numbers. Once those devices have been spotted by an attacker on the network, they then can be abused. Car alarms are vulnerable, for instance, because they connect and idle on Internet-ready cellular networks, and receive messages from control servers, Bailey says.

Bailey declined to reveal the car alarm vendor. He says these and other devices are being exposed to reverse-engineering and abuse via their GSM or cell connections. "Their proprietary protocols [traditionally] were insulated and so obfuscated that you wouldn't necessarily know what was going on under the hood," Bailey says. "[But] car-alarm manufacturers now have to worry about reverse-engineering of their proprietary protocols."

Bailey says an attacker can glean previously undisclosed aspects of the alarm device from the phone network. "Now that they're OEM'ing GSM modules ... they are leaving the whole business exposed. It's serious from that angle: Attackers can finally get under the hood easily because they have a foot in the door with GSM," he says.

Bailey plans to release new tools to help gather information about these devices. "[The tools] will show how easily you can set up a network connection for mass-scanning over the entire phone network," he says. "The idea of war-texting communication with devices over the telephone network is simple."

Bailey says the car alarm hack just scratches the surface of the inherent danger of having such devices GSM- and cell-connected. "What I got in two hours with the car alarm is pretty horrifying when you consider other devices like this, such as SCADA systems and traffic-control cameras. How quick and easy it is to re-engineer them is pretty scary," he says.

He says he was able to get enough reconnaissance on a handful of other devices to do the same type of hack. "I didn't bother to reverse-engineer them. Knowing their modules and understanding their design is enough" to pull off a war-texting attack, he says.

So how do you shore up security for these devices? "The real answer is engineering: getting the people designing these systems to analyze their security in a thorough fashion, which they are not doing now," Bailey says.

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