Hold the Door! Fingerprinting Your Car Key to Prevent Keyless Entry Car Theft
It addresses car theft prevention for automobile owners by providing a novel detection method, though it is an incremental improvement as it supports rather than replaces existing authentication systems.
This paper tackles the vulnerability of keyless entry car systems to signal relaying attacks by introducing HODOR, an RF fingerprinting method that detects such attacks without modifying existing systems, achieving a 0.27% false positive rate and 0% false negative rate in experiments.
Recently, the traditional way to unlock car doors has been replaced with a keyless entry system which proves more convenient for automobile owners. When a driver with a key fob is in the vicinity of the vehicle, doors automatically unlock on user command. However, unfortunately, it has been shown that these keyless entry systems are vulnerable to signal relaying attacks. While it is evident that automobile manufacturers incorporate preventative methods to secure these keyless entry systems, they continue to be vulnerable to a range of attacks. Relayed signals result in valid packets that are verified as legitimate, and this makes it is difficult to distinguish a legitimate door unlock request from a malicious signal. In response to this vulnerability, this paper presents an RF fingerprinting method (coined HOld the DOoR, HODOR) to detect attacks on keyless entry systems the first attempt to exploit the RF fingerprint technique in the automotive domain. HODOR is designed as a sub authentication method that supports existing authentication systems for keyless entry systems and does not require any modification of the main system to perform. Through a series of experiments, the results demonstrate that HODOR competently and reliably detects attacks on keyless entry systems. HODOR achieves both an average false positive rate (FPR) of 0.27 percent with a false negative rate (FNR) of 0 percent for the detection of simulated attacks, corresponding to current research on keyless entry car theft.