In the USA, we believe we don't need regulations, the Free Market(tm) will punish corporations that don't behave in a way that benefits their customers!

Insane to me that so many people believe this...

From my understanding immobilizer bypass tools are cheap and plenty.

Too bad the only thing our current government can think to do is ban the FlipperZero.

They're being sued because they deliberately made the cars easier to steal in the US than they are elsewhere.

> However, that carjacking in Milwaukee and Chicago specifically would follow from a nationwide omission of interlocks is not obvious as the vehicles are easily stolen without the need for personal confrontation.

I think parent-poster means that the easily-stolen cars are being used as tools of carjacking, rather than the targets of it. In particular, carjacking that occurs by somehow provoking a victim to stop on the highway shoulder, a location where attackers can't exactly arrive by foot or bus or bike. That way they don't involve a vehicle that might be observed and traced back to them.

An alternate explanation is that they meant to write something like "theft" and accidentally put down "carjacking" instead.

Since Kia/Hyundai is the only automotive group to have this problem, I'm going to go ahead continuing to blame them.

> Volkswagen has entered the chat

Lmao, good reference to u/bcantrill.

In my opinion, the better way to design such a thing would be for there to be a private key held in a secure environment inside the car which is used to sign credentials which offer entitlements to some set of features.

So for example, when provisioning the car initially, the dealer would plug into the OBDii port, authenticate to the car itself, and then request that the car sign a JWT (or similar) which contains the new owner's email address or Kia account ID as well as the list of commands that a user is able to trigger.

In your scenario, they would plug into the OBDii port, authenticate to the car, and sign a JWT with a short expiration time that allows them to query whatever they need to know about the car from the Kia servers.

The biggest thing you would lose in this case is the ability for _any_ dealer to geolocate any car that they don't have physical access to, which could have beneficial use cases like tracking a stolen car. On the other hand, you trade that for actual security against any dealership tracking any car without physical access for a huge range of nefarious reasons.

Of course, those use cases like repossessing the car or tracking a stolen vehicle would still be possible. In the former, the bank or dealership could store a token that allows tracking location, with an expiration date a few months after the end of the lease or loan period. In the latter, the customer could track the car directly from their account, assuming they had already signed up at the time the car was stolen.

You could still keep a very limited unauthenticated endpoint available to every dealer that would only answer the question "what is the connection status for this vehicle?" That is a bit of an information leak, but nowhere near as bad as being able to real-time geolocate any vehicle or find any owner's email address just given a VIN.

Those aren’t the only options. It would be trivial change to allow any dealer to request access to any vehicle and have it tied to the active employees SSO or something similar that at least leave an audit trail and prevents such random access. Allowing anyone to be a dealer is the real oversight. They could put some checks in place also to prevent the stalker situation GP mentioned. It’s always going to be possible but reduces risk a lot if employee just has to ask someone else to approve their access request, even if it’s just a rubber stamp process making sure the vehicle is actually in need of some service

That's not a benefit to me if I can't control how someone gets access to my vehicle, dealership or not. If I want a dealership to be able to assist me, I should have to authorize that dealership to have access, and have the power to revoke it at any time. Same for the car manufacturer. It ideally should include some combination of factors including a cryptographic secret in the car, and some secret I control. Transfer of ownership should involve using my car's secret and my car's secret to transfer access to those features.

If you feel like this sound like an asinine level of requirements in order for me to feel okay with this featureset, I'd require the same level of controls for any incredibly expensive, and potentially dangerous liability in my control that has some sort of remote backdoor access via a cloud. All of this "value add" ends up being an expense and a liability to me at the end of the day.

This is quite common in Europe. There is normally no special relationship with the original dealer and the service history is centralised for most manufacturers.

License plates are incredibly insecure. They are a short, easy to automatically recognize ID that is expensive to change, and it is a crime to drive while they are covered.

OTOH, OnStar's remote disable feature is pretty compelling for consumers. It's not hard to find YouTube videos [1] of thieves being thwarted safely.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9FbBgG2axE

As the article says, you don't need an active subscription to be vulnerable. In this case it seems that if the model supports the features at all, you are vulnerable.

This makes sense, because they want people to be able to subscribe to their services later without having to visit the dealership, so they make it possible to remotely enable the service.

I'm not sure if you can buy a tinfoil hat for a car.

Otherwise it spies on you with no account

I wonder how well current adaptive cruise control/collision prevention technology works to help someone safely drive drunk. I don't own a car with these features but once rented a 2021 Nissan for a road trip and just set the cruise control to 70 and it would maintain a safe distance from other cars automatically down to like 20 mph iirc. I didn't, but I probably could have been drunk and driven that car without much issue, not that I am advocating for this.

There's probably already a bunch of data being collected about cars parked at e.g. a bar for a few hours that's being used to train some AI to detect driving behaviors associated with drunk driving or something like that.

Your Honda almost certainly has HondaLink, which connects via cellular https://www.honda.ca/en/hondalink/hondalink-2?year=2023&mode... and they're probably selling your location data to databrokers https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2024/03/how-figure-out-what-yo...

Thanks.

I would guess 99.9% of car owners who use the app would not set up a personal subdomain or manage a FLOSS stack

Sorry no. App unlock is a stupid anti-feature, do people genuinely think it's better than pressing a keyfob?

Remote start is very useful in very cold climates, but guess what, it doesn't need a phone, an app or the internet. My friend in a snowy part of Japan had a radio keyfob that did this literally 10 or more years ago. As long as you were within about 100 ft of the car you could switch it on and turn on the heaters.

CarPlay doesn't use your car's internet, it uses your phone's internet. That's part of the whole beauty of it.

Unlock via Bluetooth is perfectly viable without internet connection (unless you mean unlocking it for someone else?). Remote start and temp control should probably work from a few hundred feet away. If only phones had a longer range local radio, perhaps something like Zigbee. Maybe WiFi direct?

If the car manufacturer can remote unlock and start your car for you, it can be abused by a hacker in same way. It's the exact same argument against backdoors in encryption for the government, if a backdoor works for them, it'll work for hackers too.

Why do you give CarPlay credit for those features? No need for CarPlay for any of those. What do you get from CarPlay that you don't get from a connected car without CarPlay?

It just doesn’t have to be the internet.

It's never well done.