More from the article ...

... Most people would never imagine that the innocuous tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) in their vehicles could be used to track their movements.

But, as with many things digital, it turns out the feature, designed for vehicle safety and maintenance, can also expose unintended signals that enable precisely that capability.

Low Cost Vehicle Tracking

A team of researchers from universities in Spain, Switzerland, and Luxembourg recently conducted a study where they deployed a small network of low-cost spectrum receivers, priced at around $100 each, along a road to capture TPMS transmissions from passing vehicles.

Their goal was to explore the potentially sensitive information they could infer by analyzing the TPMS transmission data from a set of 12 test vehicles.

Over a 10-week period, the researchers gathered more than six million TPMS transmissions from some 20,000 vehicles that used the road.

The researchers then used custom-developed algorithms to try and match TPMS signals from each of the different tires on a vehicle to the same car and from there to infer movement of the 12 vehicles in the study. ...

More from the article ...

... TPMS sensors -- mandated in the US since 2007 -- transmit tire pressure readings automatically and at regular intervals whenever a vehicle is in motion.

It requires no pairing or authentication and cannot be disabled without compromising the safety function it is designed to provide.

The data is sent wirelessly to a receiver module, which is often integrated with the vehicle's onboard computer or a dedicated TPMS controller. The receiver monitors tire pressure and triggers a dashboard alert if the pressure drops below a predetermined safe threshold.

In the Clear (Text)

The security issue the researchers discovered is that TPMS transmissions are sent over the air in clear text without any authentication.

Thus, anyone with a receiver capable of picking up that frequency -- like the $100 devices the researchers used -- can intercept the transmission from outside the vehicle, just as the vehicle's own internal receiver can. ...

Is ICE given access to this surveillance data?

@#4 ... This is false, the sensors sleep to save battery and are woken up from a diagnostic tool or the vehicle itself emitting a signal. ...

... and what is required to wake up the sensors?

Is that conversation encrypted and limited to the vehicle itself?

From the article ...

... It requires no pairing or authentication and cannot be disabled without compromising the safety function it is designed to provide. ...

"Our results show that TPMS transmissions can be used to systematically infer potentially sensitive information such as the presence, type, weight or driving pattern of the driver," the researchers noted in a research paper. Anyone can misuse a TPMS signal to track vehicles and, by extension, the movements of their owners, the researchers said. ...

@#6 ... You had to know that was coming. ...

Yup.

It is so lame, but, I do have to give it credit for its unabashed persistence.

;)