Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Keep Hackers Out of Your Car With This Relay Hack Blocker”.
Is your car door safe from electronic hackers? If you’ve seen the latest news, you might be worried that bad guys are now able to steal the electronic codes. Your car key sends when it unlocks your car door from a distance using your remote or in some cases. Even when you don’t press the button on the remote, but when you use your car’s keyless entry system, but all is not lost, in fact to prevent the proximity keyless entry exploit. All you really need is a metal box. The keyless entry hack, called a relay hack, is postulated to work by boosting the signal between your car and its key. Normally, when your key is more than a foot or two from your car, the radial signal the car uses to activate the key is too weak and the keyless feature will not work. But if there’s a specialized signal amplifier between your car and the key or as some people theorize two amplifiers one near the car and one near your house, the car can be tricked into thinking the key is next to it and it will unlock here’s. How to thwart that attack just put the key in a metal box, so the hacker’s booster can’t communicate with it technically you’re, putting it in a faraday cage, a box through which the necessary radio signals cannot penetrate. We made a faraday cage with tin, foil and a small box. It worked really well with the key in the box. The touch to open access of the car did not work at all, but our tin, foil box was really ugly, so we tried another metal box.
First, a cookie tin, then an altoids box, both of them blocked the signal when they were a foot or more from the car, but not 100 of the time when held right next to them. We also tried making a box out of a more attractive, copper metal mesh that worked better than the tin boxes. It blocked the signal most of the time when the key was in the box right next to the car and all the time from more than about one and a half feet out. In other words, our ugly foil box was the best blocker for the relay attack, while tins and copper mesh boxes blocked the signal considerably, but not completely by the way. Science and radio engineering tells us that if you want to make your own faraday cage, you want to use a conductive metal like copper and if you use a mesh, make sure the holes are smaller than one tenth. The wavelength of the signal in north america and japan, car remotes transmit at 315 megahertz, which is a wavelength of about 0.95 meters, so a mesh with holes, smaller than 9.5 centimeters, should work.
Other countries use key fobs that work at 433.92 megahertz for a wavelength of 0.69 meters, so holes under 7 centimeters are what you’re looking for and the one thing you must do when making a faraday enclosure for your key is to make sure the box closes. Otherwise, the radial signal will get in and the relay exploit can still work. Science not withstand our experience tells us your best. Protection against the relay attack is to line a box with aluminum foil, it’s more reliable, even though a nice mesh box probably works well enough and certainly looks cooler, we’ll keep looking into homemade solutions to fork car hacks, but for now the foil is your friend.
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