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Cryptographers unlock code of 'thiefproof' car key

Matthew Green starts his 2005 Ford Escape with a duplicate key he had made at Lowe's. Nothing unusual about that, except that the automobile industry has spent millions of dollars to keep him from being able to do it.

Green, a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, is part of a team that plans to announce Saturday that it has cracked the security behind "immobilizer" systems from Texas Instruments. The systems reduce car theft, because vehicles will not start unless the system recognizes a tiny chip in the authorized key. They are used in millions of Fords, Toyotas and Nissans.

All that would be required to steal a car, the researchers said, is a moment next to the car owner to extract data from the key, less than an hour of computing, and a few minutes to break in, feed the key code to the car and hot-wire it.

An executive with the Texas Instruments division that makes the systems did not dispute that the Hopkins team had cracked its code, but said there was much more to stealing a car than that. The devices, said the executive, Tony Sabetti, "have been fraud-free and are likely to remain fraud-free."

Source: CNET news, January 29, 2005

Federal Attempts at Increased Surveillance

"we are concerned about your recently introduced “Encryption Protects the Rights of Individuals from Violation and Abuse in Cyberspace” bill (S. 2067; “E-Privacy”). While the stated intent of the bill is to give citizens access to strong encryption products and to allow the software industry to export products featuring strong encryption, E-Privacy grants enormous new powers of surveillance and export control to the federal government.

Source: Free Congress Foundation, June 15, 1998

FBI, Security Chiefs Ask Senate For Keys to All Encrypted Data

One week after President Clinton touted a tax-free, market-driven Internet policy, his top crime fighters went to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to argue that encryption technology had to be regulated to protect the nation from terrorism and organized crime in the next century.

Source: New York Times (online)

Delay Enforcement of New Restrictions

"Lawyers for Professor Dan Bernstein today asked the Government to delay enforcement of new encryption restrictions until they can be reviewed by a court for Constitutionality."

Source: Letter from Dan Bernstein, December 30, 1996

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