Hackers Can Jailbreak Digital License Plates to Make Others Pay Their Tolls and Tickets | EUROtoday

Digital license plates, already authorized to purchase in a rising variety of states and to drive with nationwide, supply just a few perks over their sheet metallic predecessors. You can change their show on the fly to border your plate quantity with novelty messages, as an example, or to flag that your automotive has been stolen. Now one safety researcher has proven how they can be hacked to allow a much less benign function: altering a automotive’s license plate quantity at will to keep away from visitors tickets and tolls—and even pin them on another person.

Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at safety agency IOActive, has revealed a way to “jailbreak” digital license plates bought by Reviver, the main vendor of these plates within the US. By eradicating a sticker on the again of the plate and attaching a cable to its inside connectors, he is capable of rewrite a Reviver plate’s firmware in a matter of minutes. Then, with that customized firmware put in, the jailbroken license plate can obtain instructions through Bluetooth from a smartphone app to immediately change its show to indicate any characters or picture.

That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez factors out, might let drivers with the license plates evade any system that is determined by license plate numbers for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to dashing and parking tickets to automated license plate readers that police use to trace felony suspects. “You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to be able to do,” says Rodriguez. “Imagine you are going through a speed camera or if you are a criminal and you don’t want to get caught.”

Worse still, Rodriguez points out that a jailbroken license plate can be changed not just to an arbitrary number but also to the number of another vehicle—whose driver would then receive the malicious user’s tickets and toll bills. “If you can change the license plate number whenever you want, you can cause some real problems,” Rodriguez says.

All traffic-related mischief aside, Rodriguez also notes that jailbreaking the plates could also allow drivers to use the plates’ features, including its built-in GPS tracking, without paying Reviver’s $29.99 monthly subscription fee.

Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates’ firmware exists on the {hardware} degree—in Reviver’s chips themselves—Rodriguez says there is not any approach for Reviver to patch the problem with a mere software program replace. Instead, it must exchange these chips in every show. That means the corporate’s license plates are very more likely to stay susceptible regardless of Rodriguez’s warning—a truth, Rodriguez says, that transport policymakers and regulation enforcement ought to pay attention to as digital license plates roll out throughout the nation. “It’s a big problem because now you have thousands of licensed plates with this issue, and you would need to change the hardware to fix it,” he says.