Car digital keys are hackable

According to Wired, it took the boffins an hour of remote access to the digital key of one car made by a manufacturer, to crack the code for that key. From there it was a doddle to work out the code for all the digital keys made by that manufacturer.

According to one of the boffins, Orr Dunkelman, a researcher from the University of Leuven in Belgium there is a master key from which is derived the key for each car a company makes.

The code, known as KeeLoq, was leaked to a Russian hacking web site last year and this enabled the boffins to look at the system for vulnerabilities.

The boffins attacked a digital key wirelessly by sending 65,000 challenge/response queries to it. After 65,000 responses, or an hour's worth of connection, they use software they designed to decipher that key's unique code in a day.

The hack gives the attacker the 36 bits of information that are common to all of the keys for one model of car after that it only takes only a few seconds to crack the rest.

According to Wired, a hacker could get the rest of the key in a few seconds by sniffing the communication between the digital key and the car when an owner opens it.

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