Hacking the Car Navigation System

If you find you're relying a little too much on your car's navigation system, beware: Italian researchers have discovered a way to hack into some of these systems and potentially "own" the messages your car gives you and where it tells you to go.

At risk are satellite-based navigation systems that use Radio Data System-Traffic Message Channel (RDS-TMC) to receive traffic broadcasts and emergency messages, a technology that is widely deployed in vehicles throughout Europe and increasingly, North America, says Andrea Barisani, chief security engineer of Inverse Path. Barisani and Inverse Path's hardware hacker Daniele Bianco built tools that let an attacker inject fake messages to the navigation system, or launch a denial-of-service attack.

RDS-TMC provides broadcasts on traffic conditions, accidents, and detours for the driver. (RDS is also used to display the name of the radio station you're listening to on satellite radio.) The technology doesn't authenticate where the traffic comes from, so an intruder could easily send a bogus message of a road closure, rerouting drivers to another road, Barisani says. Or an attacker could pummel the system with messages and cause a denial-of-service (DOS) attack, which could crash not only a car's navigation system, but its climate control system, and stereo, too, he says.

Barisani says the criminal or terrorist element would most likely be attracted to this type of attack. "If you're a hit man, you can use that kind of system to detour or ambush someone on any street you want," he says. "We can also send sensitive messages about security events, [weather conditions], or related to terrorist incidents."

He says he got the idea of trying to perform this type of hack from his new vehicle, which uses one of these navigation systems. "There is no authentication," he says. "So I started to wonder if you could inject false traffic information into them."

"We were amazed you could put in such powerful messages and they were not authenticated in any way," he says.

To execute the exploits, the researchers built a packet-sniffer that decodes messages sent to RDS, and they plan to release a full suite of the hacking tools at next month's CanSecWest conference, where they will present their new research. They also cobbled together a transmitter to send the bogus messages, which they built using an RDS encoder you can buy off the shelf at an electronics store.

So far, they've tested the hack on navigation systems in European TomTom and Honda, Barisani says, but it will affect any navigation system based on RDS-TMC.

Clear Channel Radio's RDS-TMC-based Total Traffic Network traffic data service is likely vulnerable, he says, although he has not tested it. MINI USA and BMW, for instance, offer Total Traffic Network services in their vehicles.

Meanwhile, the good news is user data or privacy is not at risk with these types of attacks, since the attacker could only send, not grab, data.

"We're basically trying to fuzz the navigator, send it some incorrect information, and see how it would react," he says.

The researchers tested the hardware within one to five kilometers of the vehicles. An attacker could also target a specific vehicle by using a directional antenna, Barisani says, or by tweaking the power output.

Meanwhile, there are some emerging technologies for car navigation systems that could provide some protection for drivers. One thing coming out: The Transport Protocol Experts Group (TPEG) is developing a successor to RDS that can be transported over XML or digital binary format (RDS uses analog transport). It doesn't add any authentication, Barisani says, but it would be more difficult for an attacker to inject traffic into this digital format.

There's also the Global System for Telematics (GST), a European effort that would add protocols for navigation systems that let cars communicate with one another, for instance, Barisani says. GST -- which is at least five years away from availability -- will include encryption, so it would be less susceptible to attacks, he sys.

For now, there's not much you can do to determine whether your navigation system is under attack. Not until you find yourself in some deserted road far from your destination, that is. "We wanted to expose this problem. We think it's a [potentially] pretty severe one," he says. "No one has bothered looking into this, and there's no other research about it."

— Kelly Jackson Higgins, Senior Editor, Dark Reading