Canada to ban the Flipper Zero to stop surge in car thefts

Technology@lemmy.world – 375 points – 8 months ago

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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"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)

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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.