Raziel (@raziel_e) has been working in the areas of Wireless Communication and Electronic Warfare for more than 10 years. Being fascinated by the possibilities that lie in the Cyberspace, he’s looking for ways to use tools and knowledge from the RF world, in order to discover new attack surfaces and vectors.

Under Pressure: Real world damage with TPMS spoofing

Modern vehicles are equipped with Tire Pressure Monitoring System (TPMS) – a system that alerts the driver when the tire pressure is inappropriate. TPMS broadcasts an unencrypted data stream at known frequencies and has already attracted the attention of security researchers, who demonstrated the ability to spoof the transmission and cause an alert.

However, while previous research concluded that the worst case scenario would be forcing the driver to pull over for inspecting the vehicle – and by that facilitating some other illicit activities such as robbing or kidnapping – we will demonstrate an attack scenario that could quite possibly cause physical harm and in extreme cases, maybe even loss of lives.

In this talk we will quickly go over the TPMS, show how to research it using Software Defined Radio and reach spoofing capabilities, and end by showing a proof of concept for our attack scenario.

This talk is co-presented with Inbar Raz, Security Architect at Argus Cyber Security