More than 1,200 vehicles have been stolen in Ottawa this year, a 16 per cent jump from the year before, with new model SUVs and light trucks the most popular targets. New model Toyota Rav4 , Honda CRV, Jeep Grand Cherokee and Ford F-Series trucks are especially popular, along with any vehicle with a push-button starter.
Police have recovered 315 stolen vehicles and made 80 arrests, Stubbs said.
“It used to be five or 10 years ago that older cars were the target because they didn’t have the advanced alarm security that the new cars have. But the technology that they (thieves) are securing is defeating a lot of those alarms.”
There needs to be some political and legal pressure on manufactures to STOP BUILDING DOGSHIT CARS. Specifically to build inherently safe internal networks and user facing systems. It is easier to steal a new car because it takes no skill, just $100 in easy to buy hardware and some software you download from the internet.
For example, right now to program a new fob to a Honda you need to have all other fobs in the car as well, except you can use some cheap radio gear to just relay the signal from fobs that are near by and the car can not tell the difference. This could be easily prevented by requiring digital signing (like every https enabled web server) to enroll fobs. It would cost you $100 at the dealer but it saves you from losing a $30k-60K car. And now that every car has a SIM and cell modem it would be trivial to revoke a FOB and disable a car should it ever actually be stolen.
Manufactures could also stop treating CAN Bus like their bitch. Some new cars will be totally bricked by getting water in the headlight because the same CAN network that does your engine and body control also goes through the obnoxious LED headlights. This also means that thieves can get direct access to the CAN network by popping out a headlight and connecting to it with a $5 dongle. Having multiple isolated networks would prevent this, or just not using a fucking network to control lighting, it makes the light modules cost >$1000 and just adds to the insane amount of plastic and electronics waste in a car.
There are dozens of other examples of brain dead design choices making new cars easier to steal or just brick and no one seems to care because having a non-replaceable Android device in your car, which is instantly abandoned by the manufacture, is “cool.”
TL;DR Old man yells at cloud
Embedded systems in general are absolute shit – the laziest, most half-assed implementations one can imagine – whether it’s in cars or appliances or whatever else. I’m not sure what the solution is, short of forcing them to adhere to a set of best practices.