The Rise in Car Thefts Has Experts Searching for Weak Spots
Criminals can exploit everything from a vehicle’s Bluetooth connection to a headlight’s wiring, but white hat hackers are trying to improve security.
A Tesla motherboard in the hardware lab at Synacktiv headquarters in Paris.
Photographer: Cyril Marcilhacy/Bloomberg
In Paris, in a laboratory the size of a walk-in closet, a handful of researchers tinker with the infotainment system of a Tesla. They prod the device, a circuit board they bought on eBay for $400, for weaknesses. To determine which components control which functions, they connect it to an oscilloscope, a machine the size of a heart monitor; various other tools help them extract and analyze data. The fruit of their labor: the ability to send commands wirelessly to a Tesla, remotely opening the doors and the front trunk, cutting the lights and potentially turning the car off—without ever having a key, and even while the car is moving.
The researchers are so-called white hat hackers, working for a French cybersecurity company named Synacktiv that helps probe clients’ computer systems. Tesla Inc. isn’t a client—earlier this year Synacktiv won Pwn2Own, a prominent hacking competition in Vancouver sponsored by Trend Micro Inc.’s Zero Day Initiative, by showing how the security firm could compromise Tesla’s electric vehicles.