A $30 electronic device dubbed Rolljam can hack any keyless car door or garage. The device costs no more than $30 and is jeopardizing the safety of remote controls for unlocking cars and garage doors. Many major car brands are vulnerable to this hack including Volvo, Chrysler, Toyota, Volkswagen, Jaguar and some others.
Samy kamkar is a well known hacker in the world of security and particularly for cracking Master combination locks. This year at the Defcon conference, Samy demonstrated how he managed to compromise the security of the wireless remote controls of cars using a small electronic device of his own. Rolljam can hack any keyless car door or garage door without much hassle.
RollJam is designed to overpower rolling codes, which is a widely used type of security implementation for keyless entry systems. In this technology the unlock code is changed after each unlock attempt. Therefore, if anyone who would attempt to reuse the unlock code would end with a final code as obsolete already “validated”.
How Rolljam can hack any keyless car door or garage?
The way RollJam overpowers rolling codes is simple. For instance, when a car owner attempts to unlock his/her car with their key fob, RollJam will block the wireless signal and will prevent it from reaching the car using a pair of radios and will also simultaneously capture the code with a third radio. The car owner will think that his/her car has not been unlocked and will use their key fob one more time.
When the car owner attempts to unlock car one more time, RollJam will again block this signal, and steal the second code and will simultaneously re-transmit the first code it captured. The car will accept the code generated in the first attempt and the car owner will think everything is normal. Meanwhile, the hacker has a second unlock code, which he captured and can be used later.
Rolljam can hack any keyless car door or garage and after this demonstration by Samy Kamkar we can hope that car manufacturers will find a solution for this vulnerability and will fix it soon.