A security researcher has revealed a vulnerability that allows the 'jailbreaking' of digital license plates sold by Reviver, raising concerns about potential misuse for evading law enforcement and identity theft.
Josep Rodriguez, a researcher at security firm IOActive, has revealed a technique to 'jailbreak' digital license plates sold by Reviver, the leading vendor of those plates in the US with 65,000 plates already sold. By removing a sticker on the back of the plate and attaching a cable to its internal connectors, he's able to rewrite a Reviver plate's firmware in a matter of minutes.
Then, with that custom firmware installed, the jailbroken license plate can receive commands via Bluetooth from a smartphone app to instantly change its display to show any characters or image. That susceptibility to jailbreaking, Rodriguez points out, could let drivers with the license plates evade any system that depends on license plate numbers for enforcement or surveillance, from tolls to speeding and parking tickets to automatic license plate readers that police use to track criminal suspects. 'You can put whatever you want on the screen, which users are not supposed to be able to do,' says Rodriguez. 'Imagine you are going through a speed camera or if you are a criminal and you don't want to get caught.' Worse still, Rodriguez points out that a jailbroken license plate can be changed not just to an arbitrary number but also to the number of another vehicle—whose driver would then receive the malicious user's tickets and toll bills. 'If you can change the license plate number whenever you want, you can cause some real problems,' Rodriguez says. All traffic-related mischief aside, Rodriguez also notes that jailbreaking the plates could also allow drivers to use the plates' features without paying Reviver's $29.99 monthly subscription fee. Because the vulnerability that allowed him to rewrite the plates' firmware exists at the hardware level—in Reviver's chips themselves—Rodriguez says there's no way for Reviver to patch the issue with a mere software update. Instead, it would have to replace those chips in each displa
DIGITAL LICENSE PLATES SECURITY VULNERABILITY JAILBREAKING REVIVER AUTOMOTIVE TECHNOLOGY
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