Hacker Friendly

Last week at CanSecWest, Andrea Barisani and Daniele Bianco demo’d an interesting GPS hack: sending bogus data over the RDS-TMC channel. In English: You can send fake traffic updates, alerts, and other data to GPS systems that update over FM radio. Looks like we’re one step closer to GITS.

There is a brief write-up of the demo here under the unfortunate title, “Satellite navigation hack could aid terrorist attack“. From the article:

Using just a RDS encoder costing a few dollars, a hand-held antenna of the type well known to any self-respecting drive by hacker and an equally cheap and readily available FM transmitter, the hackers have demonstrated how data can be encoded into the FM signals required to inject it into the RDS TMC stream. The TMC encryption is so simple it can be easily broken by anyone sampling just the smallest amount of data and having the smallest idea of what they are doing, because it exists for discriminatory rather than authentication application.

Here is the abstract from the talk. I can’t wait to see the plans show up on Hack a Day…