Interesting: Bluetooth virus infecting Prius?

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Now that the Prius and some other cars are integrating with cell phones and bluetooth enabled devices, is there a risk?

If there isn't yet, could there be? (Hey, they got your phone, they're after your car!!)

Urban Leged; Read on:

We did the tests by infecting phones with Cabir variants and operated the car in all available Bluetooth modes. We wanted to simulate a situation where someone just walks past the car with a Cabir-infected phone that has not been paired with the car. Then we recreated a situation where the phone of the owner of the car is infected and he does Bluetooth operations with the car.

Jarno inside the car

It came as no surprise that we could not infect the car, but the Prius performed in the test even better than expected. No matter what we did the car did not react to the Bluetooth traffic at all. Cabir tried to send itself to the car and the car just did not allow the Bluetooth OBEX transfer to happen.

After finishing the tests with infected phones, we tried to transfer a Cabir-infected SIS file to the car with a special file transfer program from the phones. In this test the Prius accepted the file transfer to begin, but then displayed a message stating "Transfer failed". This message is shown for any data transmitted to a car that is not a valid VCARD phone book.

Transfer failed

While we had the car for testing, we also tried all kinds of other publicly known Bluetooth attacks on it. Our goal was to find out if the car would react in any way to known Bluetooth attacks and exploits.

After some tests we got a surprising result: Suddenly all dashboard warning lights came on. The car went totally dead. Even the door locks didn't open anymore. The onboard computer displayed a severe warning: "The transmission lock mechanism is abnormal. Park your car on a flat surface, and fully apply the hand brake". We waited hesistantly a moment, turned ignition off and rebooted the car - and everything was back to normal. Weird.

crash

We repeated the same test - with the same results. We run it for a third time - and once again the system crashed. After that we started to get really worried. This can't be right - Bluetooth can't cause this, can it? Thoughts of massive product recalls started to float in our minds.

So we started from scratch and double checked everything. Going through the standard process of elimination by switching all Bluetooth devices off and waiting for some time, the problem repeated itself. Turns out the cause of the error was low voltage. After intensive tests for all morning, the battery of the car was running low! The car computer was going haywire because of that, and the problem had nothing to do with Bluetooth! But those were quite tense moments indeed - we almost thought that the impossible might have happened.

After fixing the battery problem, we continued tests and Toyota Prius performed admirably. We managed to find one minor issue with the system (a corrupted phone name would freeze the on-board display), but otherwise the Prius Bluetooth system was far more stable than our test phones and PCs. We had to reboot our test systems several times as their Bluetooth systems died on us, while Toyota Prius just kept going.

All in all, that test was definitely one of the more interesting virus tests we've done for quite a while.

Reply to
Hachiroku
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It's not an urban legend. It's a test where experts tried very hard to infect the Prius via Bluetooth and could not.

The only problem they had was leaving the ignition on (in ACC, apparently) all day, running down the 12 volt auxilliary battery. That's hardly a problem and would have happened without the bluetooth.

An urban legend is the story that that you have to replace the hybrid battery every 3 years at $5,000 for the battery pack.

Daniel

Reply to
dbs__usenet

That can't be an urban legend; the guy with a hook for a hand and black widow spiders living in his hair told me it was true! 'Course, he was pretty messed up.

Mike

Reply to
Michael Pardee

So true. I hear that almost every time someone stops me to ask about my Prius. Once again, it seems, ignorance and superstition struggles against science and technology.

Reply to
Bill

It's about 10 years, depending on use.

Reply to
Hachiroku

In some states it's warranteed for 10 years. It's expected to last longer. At the current rate of development, the replacment battery pack will be a few hundred dollars and will last 10 to 20 years.

See the news reports of Toshiba's nano coated electrodes for more info.

Daniel

Reply to
dbs__usenet

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