Using Tire Pressure Sensors To Spy On Cars

AngryDad writes "Beginning last September, all vehicles sold in the US have been required to have Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) installed. An article up at HexView enumerates privacy issues introduced by TPMS, and some of them look pretty scary. Did you know that traffic sensors on highways can be adopted to read TPMS data and track individual vehicles? How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby? TPMS has been discussed in the past, but I haven't seen its privacy implications analyzed before. Fortunately the problem is easy to fix: encrypt TPMS data the way keyless entry systems do."

Finally, an April Fools story!!!

This is a joke, I hope. *crosses fingers*

Re: Finally, an April Fools story!!!

Personally, I've never really been scared by any of the things our government keeps telling me I should be terrorized by, but what really scares me is the bleak future I see for my kids and their kids...caused by our own Orwellian, all-powerful government.

Yeah, I soooooo hear ya on that one! You know what else scares me? Clowns. The government keeps saying that there's nothing to fear from clowns, but I know The Truth! Those colourful costumes and goofy makeup are the perfect disguises for Secret Service death squads, prowling our neighbourhoods and looking to assassinate or brainwash anyone they see purchasing organic tomatoes. It's downright terrifying!

I'm glad to see that there's other right-minded folk like me on here! Keep up the good work Mr. Transporter!

Headline: Tire PMS kills! Story at 11!

Sorry, Couldn't resist.

This isn't an 4/1 joke, is it?

Part of me feels paranoid now...

Especially this part:
How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby?
Great, first I have to worry about the tolls on I-44 through Oklahoma, now I got to worry about exploding vehicles?
Maybe in the future we can all roll to work in giant hamster balls. Getting groceries home will be a bitch tho...

Re:Part of me feels paranoid now...

Maybe in the future we can all roll to work in giant hamster balls. Getting groceries home will be a bitch tho...

Yeah, I learned this the hard way. Just make sure the food is enclosed in metal containers so the hamsters can't get to it.

Re:Part of me feels paranoid now...

When the Red Army Faction assassinated Alfred Herrhausen in 1989, they used a photocell trigger to set off an "IED" in a bicycle bag. It was a superbly precise job which targeted the actual position in the car occupied by Herrhausen.

Fast forward to now. One might scan the sensors on a target vehicle as it drives a common route, emplace IEDs on multiple routes, and break out the popcorn (or pita as the case may be) until the target drives by. This would be ideal for political hits where the target uses a specific armored vehicle.

http://www.german-way.com/aherrhsn.html [german-way.com]

"Maybe in the future we can all roll to work in giant hamster balls."

That would be quite a hamster.

Re:Part of me feels paranoid now...

Yes the use of flash triggers is interesting as it was used get the British Army's radio jamming devices
The real fun is who first thought of it :-)
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/crime/article1530661.ece [timesonline.co.uk]

Re:Part of me feels paranoid now...

This is Germans. They still study chemistry, physics and basic electronics and other freeky terrorist skills in school even today.

I would not be afraid of such nasty things happening in an decent god-fearful rule obiding English Speaking country. This has long been taken care of through the amendments to the school and university curriculum. And if worst comes to worst control orders can be used from people taking high school chemistry courses: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7107265.stm [bbc.co.uk]

RFID tracking

Tires already come with RFID tags, which can also be read and tracked remotely. Cars probably also emit all sorts of other unique signals that can be recognized and tracked.

Of course, cars also come with this thing called a "license plate", which can also be tracked remotely and wirelessly.

Basically, if you drive, you can be tracked.

President authorizes warrentless tire tapping...

In the War on Terrorism, the president in his finite capacity for wisdom has authorized any government agency, with at least 3 letters in its acronym, to engage in acts of tire tapping without the need for endless judicial oversite.

The government won't use this information to track you down to that seedy little motel on the side of route 9, where you cavort with no less than 3 women other than your wife. We only care about catching bad guys. Your wife however...

If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear but fear itself.

Re:RFID tracking

Basically, if you drive, you can be tracked.

No. Certain objects attached to the car might be able to be tracked. There is a big difference between tracking tires, license plates, etc. and tracking people. A distinction which most posters seem to have ignored in their paranoia.

Re:RFID tracking

Mostly because it's a distinction that's sure to be ignored by law-enforcement types too. Ever recieved a photo-radar, red light or toll-evasion ticket? It doesn't matter who was driving, if your car was at the scene of the crime you're responsible for the fine.

Huh?

There is a big difference between tracking tires, license plates, etc. and tracking people.

In what way is tracking a person's possessions NOT a damned effective way of tracking the person?!?!

Do complete strangers drive your car often? So you see no need for concern until a tracking device is implanted directly into your skull?

Re:RFID tracking

Using RFID combined with detectors at every street corner will allow for constant surveillance of every car all the time.

So do license plate readers, and they can operate from greater distances and completely passively. Cost for a license plate reader is about the same as a good RFID reader, and they are probably at least as reliable. Furthermore, you are required to keep your license plate readable.

Some cities are already starting to implement complete license plate-based tracking of vehicles.

Re:RFID tracking

You better tell these guys [platepass.com] because their business is OCR'ing license plates. It's not research. I rent cars from Avis in Orlando fairly regularly and they have this option right now.

Re:RFID tracking

Of course, cars also come with this thing called a "license plate", which can also be tracked remotely and wirelessly.

I don't know about "wirelessly" unless you are talking about people using their eyeballs.

On Australian highways (In my state of New South Wales, at least), we have special cameras located on overpasses and things every couple of hundred kilometres or so. These most definitely detect where the number plates are in the image, cut them out, perform OCR, then record the ones that are on trucks. It's used to enforce the laws preventing truckers from driving too far without sleep, and constant speeding.

These cameras have been around for over 10 years, and I assure you, are highly accurate.

Re:RFID tracking

Kinda hard to do without puncturing the tire. Read up on it: here. Michelin at least seems to mount it inside the laminas of the tire.

Of course you could always surround your tires in tin foil if you are THAT paranoid.

I hear that microwaving your tires for 15 seconds each will also disable the RFID tags.

Hmmm....

How about an explosive device that sets itself off when the right vehicle passes nearby?

Outside of Lebanon, I don't see this as being a huge concern. (And calling it a "privacy" issue seems a bit of an understatement.) The local governments aren't sufficiently motivated to fill potholes, let alone install IEDs specifically targeted at me.

The "solution" is not so simple.

"Fortunately the problem is easy to fix: encrypt TPMS data the way keyless entry systems do."

Unfortunately, there is a major difference here: failure to encrypt keyless entry resulted in stolen cars (something which caught people's attention and pissed them off), whereas you'll never even notice that your TPMS isn't encrypted. People are incredibly lazy and only take action when they perceive a threat to their person or property. Liberty? As Dick Cheney would say, "So?"

I'll bet adding encryption would cost the manufacturers $0.01 per tire (or some equally trivial amount), which they will claim will ruin them. Nobody else (except for a bunch of whiny, personal liberty freaks) will care about this and it will quietly become ubiquitous.

Besides, if you aren't doing anything illegal, why should you care who takes note of your comings and goings. We're here to help you and we certainly can't do that unless we know where you are ... at all times ...

Re:The "solution" is not so simple.

The solution is even easier than encryption. Just don't broadcast a unique identifier!

In this case there's no reason for each tire pressure sensor to be broadcasting one. All they need to do is chirp back the pressure inside the tire. That's it. Give them enough power to hit a receiver located in the wheel (which might be 4-6" away in a very large tire, probably a lot closer than that, and it's all inside the steel-belted tire) and call it a day. Unless you are playing Ben Hur, you're not going to get close enough to another car's tires for it to become a problem -- use a high frequency and you're going to get a substantial bit of attenuation via the tire itself, and then you're decreasing as the square of the distance through free space. You're never going to have more than one valve-stem sensor per wheel-mounted receiver, so why bother with it?

If you really do need a weak form of identification, rather than hardcoding a UID, it would be pretty trivial to have each sensor randomly choose a number from a range such that the chance of collisions was low (deriving the randomness from resistor noise or by oversampling whatever analog sensor they use to determine pressure) and reset periodically or each time the car is started. That eliminates the problem of having to coordinate UIDs and prevent duplicates (cf. the cheap Bluetooth transceivers that caused problems because their MAC-ish addresses were all zeros). Every unit can be completely identical.

On further consideration, I can't really imagine why the designers of the TPMS would have given each sensor a UID (especially since it would probably cause confusion when you rotate tires, if the car's computer tracks them) ... making me wonder if this is just an elaborate 4/1 hoax.

Can we get a car analogy for this?

I'm having trouble grasping the concepts, can someone put it into a nice analogy using cars? What... wait... damnit.

Probably not a 4/1 story.

Here (at the end of this post) is the text of the applicable document summarizing the TREAD act.
http://www.tireindustry.org/pdf/TREAD_Act_Summary.pdf [tireindustry.org]

    Looks to me that no one is requiring continual monitoring (and reporting) of tires' conditions; only when the tire pressure falls below 25% of recommended cold pressure is a signal required to be sent (and I see nothing about being able to tell which car in a fleet has the problem from outside the car itself).

    Finally, article summary should say "all NEW vehicles sold in the US" require the system, not "all vehicles sold in the US".

The final rule was published June 5, 2002. Unfortunately NHTSA
proposed that if a vehicle is using a direct system (with sensors in each
tire sending a signal to the dashboard) the TPMS does not have to trigger
until the tire is 25 percent below the recommended cold psi. An indirect
TPMS (that runs off the anti-lock braking system) does not have to
trigger until the tire is 30 percent below the recommended cold psi for
that tire. TIA is strongly opposed to NHTSA's supposed "safety"
regulation which in effect allows the motoring public to drive on severely
underinflated tires. TIA has supported a petition that NHTSA mandate
reserve inflation pressure in tires to offset the TPMS rule. [See letter to
NHTSA supporting petition.]

Run flat tires need TPMS

The article asks why would NHTSA choose TPMS and not run-flat technology [wikipedia.org]. Run-flat tires cannot be used indefinitely while uninflated or underinflated. Generally, in such situations the sidewall supports the load, and the resulting stress on the sidewall damages it, eventually leading to failure. Furthermore, you might not be able to see that the tire isn't properly inflated. In order to prevent people from driving on underinflated run-flat tires until a catastrophic failure and possible accident, TPMS is required. Oh, and run-flat tires have other disadvantages too.

Re:

Or tin foil hub caps.

Re:OnStar

I know 1 person with on star, and they were in a bad accident, having the OnStar saved her life.

Clearly OnStar causes accidents.