ISRAELI and Belgian boffins have discovered that the algorithm used in anti-theft digital key systems cars made by Honda, Ford, General Motors, Mercedes Benz and Jaguar are flawed.

According to Wired, it took the boffins an hour of remote access to the digital key of one car made by a manufacturer, to crack the code for that key. From there it was a doddle to work out the code for all the digital keys made by that manufacturer.

According to one of the boffins, Orr Dunkelman, a researcher from the University of Leuven in Belgium there is a master key from which is derived the key for each car a company makes.

The code, known as KeeLoq, was leaked to a Russian hacking web site last year and this enabled the boffins to look at the system for vulnerabilities.

The boffins attacked a digital key wirelessly by sending 65,000 challenge/response queries to it. After 65,000 responses, or an hour’s worth of connection, they use software they designed to decipher that key’s unique code in a day.

The hack gives the attacker the 36 bits of information that are common to all of the keys for one model of car after that it only takes only a few seconds to crack the rest.

According to Wired, a hacker could get the rest of the key in a few seconds by sniffing the communication between the digital key and the car when an owner opens it.

More information [Wired]