- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- technology@lemmy.world
Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts::The Canadian government plans to ban the Flipper Zero and similar devices after tagging them as tools thieves can use to steal cars.
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Oh Canada…
They should really try banning car theft, it’s a lot more direct and to the point.
But at least they can persecute tinkerers and cyber security professionals while the criminals continue to steal cars.
It’s win-win for the POS in law enforcement. They create more crime stats for themselves to ensure their increased funding.
Even better, tinkerers and cyber security professionals are easy to find and there’s a much lower chance of them fighting back compared to actual car thieves so it’s very low risk for the police. They get to be lazy and safe while padding their numbers, all their favorite things at once.
This thread shows some Canadians aren’t willing to imprison the car thieves because they think societal factors forced them to steal cars. If Canada isn’t willing to arrest low level car thieves, we will soon be a nation of highly skilled car thieves.
Hi there! Looks like you linked to a Lemmy community using a URL instead of its name, which doesn’t work well for people on different instances. Try fixing it like this: !canada@lemmy.ca
Them: if someone’s getting caught stealing their third car then clearly jail doesn’t work to stop them from doing that and maybe we should think of trying something else?
You: they want to just let car thieves walk free!
See what makes you look silly?
I’m confused, do you think that systemic issues aren’t a major factor in all crime, especially theft?
I do think its a factor, i dont think the solution is just letting car theives walk away because they are in a tough spot. That thief will just keep stealing cars and they will get better at it the more they steal and more confident the more they know they won’t be prosecuted.
I didn’t see the comments that said we should let car thieves walk away
This person who is insisting we punish low level criminals because they all will turn into high level criminals needs to stop playing GTA, pay a bill or two in life, and realize that poverty creates desperation, and in fact, locking up “low level” criminals actually exposes them to the more hardened ones who have turned it into a lifestyle.
If you don’t get thrown in a cage with dangerous people and treated like an animal, your odds of rehabilitation skyrocket.
Exposing people to violence, punishment and harder criminals is the least productive way to rehabilitation.
you’ve linked entire community, not single thread
I did initially but I edited it and it seems to work for me
Oh shit, I wanted to steal a car but now because of this ban it will be illegal, how bad.
Yeah, since we can’t stop murderers, we should do nothing about it.
Flipper Zero can’t be used to hijack any car, specifically the ones produced after the 1990s, since their security systems have rolling codes
So actually doing nothing.
“If you want to stop murders just ban kitchen knives.” --canadian politicians
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Let’s establish an international anti-murder day. It won’t save anyone, but at least we did SOMETHING!
Banning flipper is exactly that- doing nothing- because you can’t actually use one to steal a car.
The thing we should do is to hold car manufacturers accountable for neglecting security in cars.
Remember, the “s” in IoT stands for security.
nice one
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If you truly want to solve something then you have to make some draconian-like laws and enforce it with rigorous effort. Sometimes the harshest measures are the safest measures.
deleted by creator
Ah, thank you!🥰
Now tell everyone how banning a device which can’t be used for car thefts, will somehow help with car thefts.
I think we’d all like to know.
Or, you know, it’s incredibly stupid to ban. But what do I know? Other than that you can’t use a flipper to steal a car of course.
We can’t stop murderers, so let’s band all guns, knives, baseball bats and tire irons.
I do agree with the gun part, the rest are up to serious debate.
They were being sarcastic.
How hard would it be to make a similar device?
How specific is the law? I can imagine these idiots either…
- Very specifically banning flipper so now people make a functionally identical device called the reppilf that is totally legal
- Banning any computing device capable of transmitting radio, thus outlawing all cellphones, laptops, desktops, iot, etc.
PS: as others said, wouldn’t be super hard to pull off, just a matter of assembling parts. This is why banning tools is almost always fucking stupid and only penalizes those who follow the law.
This is how every licensed gun owner in Canada has felt for years. You can go read how they word those laws to get a good idea of how they would go about wording this one. It’s not great.
A single-board computer, radio modules, and the appropriate software. Trivial for someone with the technical knowledge. The only thing that made the flipper unique is that it comes pre-packaged.
The uniformity is also nice. Lots of tutorials targetting it
Politicians being stupid and thick, as usual.
This can be replicated with off-the-shelf components and readily available software. The real issue is the low security of cars.
Also, a similar device with better capabilities is about to hit the market.
Also, a similar device with better capabilities is about to hit the market.
What’s it called?
Dave
Good thing I ordered one a couple days ago
This has made me think that I should order one too. Must be a good tool if it needs to be made illegal.
You can break into thirty year old cars!
That’s fucking bullshit wtf. This is exactly like bad gun reform that comes from someone who doesn’t know shit about the thing they are trying to reform
Welcome to Canada. Turning dials that aren’t connected to anything is the specialty of our “leaders”.
lol, you can do many things with a flipper zero. Stealing a car is not one of those things.
Well it can give access to a car. Soooo…
Only 30+ year old cars, but a coat hanger can do that too. Soooo…
“Trudeau to ban coat hangers, other clothing care items, after rash of thefts of ancient vehicles”
Is that why I haven’t seen a wire coat hanger in forever?
No the world just ran out of coat hanger bones and is trying to hide it with plastic replacements
Who are you fooling? Tech savvy people don’t know how to handle coat hangers.
Plus videos show you that it also works on newer cars. To much Hassle though, but thatch’s also mentioned in the article.
Those videos are staged. The signal playback trick doesn’t work on newer cars because the code changes every time you lock or unlock your car. You could probably replicate the functionality of a key fob on your Flipper, but it would need to be registered with the car’s computer the same as any other key fob, which means you’d already have to have to access to the car.
There are definitely some basic attacks that you can do with a flipper. They are quite a bit more limited than what you can do with an SDR though, and I’m skeptical that they are widely deployed by anyone. You definitely can’t steal a car like this, you can possibly unlock one. But hammers are much more useful in that regard and have a significantly lower skill floor.
And you need additional hardware and custom firmware. Then you have to GitHub that shit into the flipper.
Most people think it works like Dr. Who’s sonic screwdriver. Just press a button, wave it around and voila! You’re in the NSA database.
Signal playback doesn’t require anything extra. I love that their docs have a giant warning to not use it on new cars though.
Isn’t that because it can desync the actual keyfob?
Nvm… Clicked the link. That’s exactly why you shouldn’t do that.
Ah, so the cars still have shitty security implementations, only now it’s in the direction of “car needs service if someone tries to playback a previous signal”.
Though how does it work when you hit the button while out of range of the car?
It should be each fob has a private key that is used to generate a cryptographic hash of a random challenge string. Or hell, even give a rolling code a sequence number so they the car and fob can resync if necessary (I don’t think this would break the security, since the sequence could be started at a number other than 0).
That sounds dangerously close to an open standard that would prevent charging $500 for key fobs.
That is my understanding and why I haven’t ventured into that area with my personal vehicles yet.
Butter knives can be used to murder people. Quick let’s ban them to solve all murder.
JFC.
He/she stated that you can’t steal a car with a flipper. But you can. That it isn’t a go to tool is something else.
Besides this, you can use a flipper as a butter knife…
Snow fucking white.
Yes it can be used to steal some cars.
Banning it because it can be used to steal cars doesn’t make sense
Btw… Some folks may not realize it is a go to tool for many things.
Flipper Zero - Wikipedia Flipper Zero is a portable Tamagotchi-like multi-functional device developed for interaction with access control systems. The device is able to read, copy, and emulate RFID and NFC tags, radio remotes, iButton, and digital access keys, along with a GPIO interface.
It is a swiss army knife for RF access control systems as well as harmless, related things like remote controls.
It is used by penetration testers (information security professionals) to do myriad kinds of legit, legal work in their field.
Like any tool it can be used for good or evil. The problem isn’t the tool but the vulnerabilities in cars demonstrating shocking negligence on the part of manufacturers.
Banning the tools just gives us a false sense of security. The vulnerability still exists. It isn’t that difficult for someone to either get the tool, reproduce the tool, or make a new tool with existing parts. Meanwhile law abiding people cannot find the vulnerabilities as easily.
This mostly only serves to penalize a smallish company and protect large car manufacturers from the consequences of their negligence.
It is already illegal to steal cars. Why would criminals risking felony jail time care about whether their tools are suddenly illegal, too?
I doubt this is the real reason they are being banned, it’s just the excuse they came up with.
They just want to appear to be doing something, even though they aren’t doing anything useful.
Another distraction for the big problems not getting solved
this is funny.
Never heard of these devices but now I kinda want one.
streisand effect they are going to be sold out everywhere now
They already were.
Personally, i would require car manufacturers to make their cars resistant to such trivial exploits, but this works too i guess
But, but, what about their precious profits??
Eh it doesn’t really, there isn’t a surge in radio attacks on cars, it’s just a novel concept so people are feeling spooked
But I’m with you on your first point, security needs to be hardened and the only one who can truly do that is the manufacturer
It’s the equivalent of banning paperclips because they saw a videoclip of somebody opening locks with a paper clip, and completely ignoring all other tools that can open a lock faster than using the key.
Confidentiality incorrect
“Flipper Zero can’t be used to hijack any car, specifically the ones produced after the 1990s, since their security systems have rolling codes,” Flipper Devices COO Alex Kulagin told BleepingComputer.
I guess Canada must have a ton of old cars?
Or the “rolling codes” have glaring implementation issues, but it is cheaper to ban the Flipper Zero than recall the cars, so the manufacturers made an executive decision… (⚠️ YouTube)
Here is an alternative Piped link(s):
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source; check me out at GitHub.
It also can’t be used to hijack cars produced before the 1990s, since they mostly don’t have keyless entry in the first place.
Rolljack attacks are absolutely not trivial to pull off and I am quite skeptical that a flipper can even do it reliably, if at all, since it requires reactively jamming the transmission after the attacker has already decoded it. I don’t believe these devices have enough power to reliably jam the key fob, much less the speed to do it reactively.
“This here’s the Lockpocking Lawyer, and today we’re going to take a closer look at the Flipper Zero….”
