Car Moon

For many of us, the thought of having our car stolen is too great a burden to bear. We assure ourselves by investing in alarm systems, secure parking and cars fitted with keyless entry and start. These cars, we think, would be harder for criminals to steal. How wrong we are.

At the upcoming Network and Distributed System Security Symposium in San Diego, researchers from ETH Zurich’s system security group will present evidence on how they successfully hacked ten cars from eight manufacturers, using the sort of equipment you can buy at your local electronics’ store.

The small team of computer science researchers – Assistant Professor Srdjan Capkun, Aurélien Fancillon and Boris Danev – were able to gain access and drive away in all ten vehicles simply by exploiting the way keyless entry systems work.