Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Police to control Onstar*

well, sort of.
LINK

Slick way to end high speed chases, but...

General Motors (GM) plans to equip 1.7 million of its 2009 model vehicles with the system that allows pursuing officers to request that engines of stolen cars be remotely switched off through the OnStar mobile communications system.

Who the heck would want to steal a GM car?

How do the OnStar folks know which car to disable? Do the cops have a database connecting license plates to VINs or something? What if the bad guy has switched plates with somebody, and his victim gets her engine disabled just as she's pulling into traffic? I s'pose we'll be held responsible for that liability too, huh? How does GM know the caller is a cop in pursuit rather than somebody (possibly a cop) playing a practical joke on somebody?

won't take long for those signals to be hacked, I bet. Kinda like the high tech equivalent of stealing your friend's distributor cap.......

Inasmuch as power steering etc would also be shut down if the vehicle's engine is shut down remotely, one could speculate that even with pursueing LEOs choosing the "best time" to execute such a tactic that this could aggravate the risks to other vehicles in the disabled vehicle's path.

Bet the OnStar and GM legal and risk mgmt folks look long and hard at this and have all sorts of disclaimers..IF it ever happens.Jim

I wouldn't want to try hacking them. Hacking the old analog garage-door openers was one thing: hacking point-to-point digital authentication is something else--regardless of what they say in the movies.

It'd be a lot easier to get your cop friend drunk and persuade him to tell you the authcode he uses when he's in a chase.

Barak - you wouldn't want to try because of the challenge or because of the ramifications?

Not looking to paint you in a corner - just trying to see if that type of signal is difficult or not - I would think getting into the Onstar network to operate it's functions remotely would be the way to go - not intercept a signal and change it. Then again I have 0 background in either.

On Star* is another reason I will not buy GM, the other is that my local dealer royally screwed me on a repair with service contract...no more GM for me. Another thing, what's with this black box that records info and stores it after a crash. I buy the car and the cops get the info without asking nor subpoena. I'd like to disable that sob too.

The story is that the owner must report the vehicle stolen, and then the cop supposedly can call Onstar for a "depower" signal. Supposedly the Onstar will flash the lights on the vehicle so the cop can supposedly verify the right car. Then onstar can supposedly reduce power to the vehicle (not cut off).

That's a lot of "supposedlys" that Big Brother is not, in fact, watching us...... FWIW, Dutch.

257;
My '07 Toyota Tacoma has that black box. In the owner's manual it tells what it can record, and "assures" me that the info is just for Toyota...

According to the article, it won't kill the engine. It will slowly reduce HP until the car can't move. That will give the crook time to get off a busy highway before he becomes a traffic hazard. My guess is that when a crook discovered what was going on, he'd stop wherever he was, like in the middle of a freeway, and bail out.

Dick

I wonder if they'll still break the windows out, even though the doors will unlock from satellite, too...?

Because of the challenge. Modern digital cryptography is essentially unbreakable, even at Fort Meade, until somebody finds a quick way to factor multi-thousand-digit numbers. I don't know the details of OnStar's satellite downlink, but it's certainly digitally encrypted.

If you wanted to send a bogus OnStar signal to a car, or to many cars, you wouldn't want to try it with a laptop computer and a handheld transceiver: you'd have to somehow compromise the security of OnStar Central so that you were commanding the encryption rather than trying to break it.

(Unless the OnStar computers in the cars run Windows, of course.)

The OnStar folks seem to be smart enough to keep humans in the loop. For example, if you call in a car-unlock request ten thousand times consecutively with incremental four-digit security codes, a human is likely to become suspicious, whereas a computer might not be. Also, it takes an entirely different skill set to "socially engineer" a human operator than it does to attack a webserver.

Nah, I'd work on the cop end of things, not the tech end.

Most likely the individual officers will not have the code, any such athorization will be at the supervisory level. Most department pursuit policy, is structured so that a pursuit has to be authorized by the suporvisor to even be initiated, the suporvisor also can stop it at any time if they deem it to be more of a hazard that is called for.
I would think the point to point authentication from onstar would have to come from the supervisor, AFTER the true identity of the pursued vehicle is established through DMV records, and it's status. The only time such athority could be used would be say a pursuit of a stolen vehicle driven by a suspect who is proven or could be an extreme danger to the public or in a hostage situation. Not because Joe Sixpack had a few and was running for home to avoid another DUI. The only persons who should worry about this would be the Tony Soprano types who think they need to hide something.

God sakes folks, wake up a little. Of course Big Brother is watching all of us 24-7. Where do you think you live, anyway, in a free country where you have rights to privacy?

Wayne

Apparently the onstar system includes a gps. They know where your car is alla damn time - and presumably you.

Well.....you just gave me another reason to keep all of my older pickups.....been wanting to rebuild a couple of them anyway.

Casey

Exactly...............................................

Try to disable onstar and see how your vehicle runs.

If the purposew is to deactivate stolen vehicles why to the police need to be involved. Just call Onstar and report the vehicle stolen and let Onstar do it. Some way to prevent the car from staring after it had been turned off would prevent accidents though it might cause a line to back up at the gas station.

If they're watching me they must really get bored.