Honda Cars : Windows Do Not Automatically Lower Under Water, Honda Says | 2013 New Honda Car Reviews 0

Interesting, I did not know this....

By JERRY GARRETT

Honda said on Thursday that news reports claiming that the power windows on its vehicles automatically opened during the storm, flooding the cars, were not true.

The reports said sensors that detected when a car was submerged were the culprit.

But Honda vehicles do not have a feature that rolls down the windows if the vehicle is under water, Chris Martin, a spokesman for American Honda, wrote in an e-mail.

It was widely reported that some Honda owners went to check on their vehicles and found that the power windows had lowered, and as a result the vehicles were full of water.

A report by The Associated Press on Tuesday said, “Reggie Thomas, a maintenance supervisor at a prison near the overflowing Hudson River, emerged from an overnight shift, a toothbrush in his front pocket, to find his Honda with its windows down and a foot of water inside. The windows automatically go down when the car is submerged to free drivers.”

This is not true, Mr. Martin wrote.


“There is no automatic function to lower the windows when a car is submerged,” he wrote. “But the Honda window switch spec for many years has required that our power window switches will operate to open the window even when the car is submerged. Thus, someone could still open the window as normal” if that someone was still in the car, and conscious, after it had become submerged.

He added, “That applied to all Honda and Acura models sold in at least the last 10 years or longer.”
Mr. Martin wrote that he was unaware of such an issue being identified previously.

Karen Aldana, a spokeswoman for the federal Transportation Department, said such an occurrence would be outside the government’s purview because problems like “leaks” are a “consumer satisfaction issue,” not a vehicle safety issue.

Source;
http://wheels.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/01/windows-do-not-automatically-lower-under-water-honda-says/

Honda Cars : Researchers beat automatic locking and ignition systems. | 2013 New Honda Car Reviews 0

I never did like this feature, I am glad that Honda hasn't jumped on board with this yet....
Car Theft by Antenna
Researchers beat automatic locking and ignition systems.
By Erica Naone

Car thieves of the future might be able to get into a car and drive away without forced entry and without needing a physical key, according to new research that will be presented at the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium next month in San Diego, California.

The researchers successfully attacked eight car manufacturers' passive keyless entry and start systems—wireless key fobs that open a car's doors and start the engine by proximity alone.

Srdjan Capkun, an assistant professor of computer science in the system security group at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, who led the work, says he was inspired to investigate the security of keyless entry and start systems after buying a car that had one. Capkun and Aurélien Francillon and Boris Danev, both researchers in the same institution, examined 10 car models from the eight manufacturers. They were able to access all 10 and drive them away by intercepting and relaying signals from the cars to their wireless keys. While they could relay the signals from the key back to the car as well, usually they did not need to because the key transmits its signals up to around 100 meters. The attack works no matter what cryptography and protocols the key and car use to communicate with each other.

Normally, when a wireless key is within a few meters of the right car, it detects a low-powered signal that causes it to issue a command that opens the car enable the ignition. The researchers used a pair of antennas to transmit these signals from the car to the key when the key was farther away, tricking the car into opening without the ordinary authorization. One antenna needs to be very close to the car, and one needs to be within eight meters of the key.

The researchers came up with two versions of the attack. In one, they ran a cable from near the car to near the key and used it to transmit the signals. They conducted the other wirelessly.

Francillon says that the materials for the wired attack cost about $50, and those for the wireless attack cost between $100 and $1,000, depending on the electronic components used.

The researchers tested a few scenarios. An attacker could watch a parking lot and have an accomplice watch as car owners as entered a nearby store. The accomplice would only need to be within eight meters of the targeted owner's key fob, making it easy to avoid arousing suspicion.

In another scenario, a car owner might leave a car key on a table near a window. An antenna placed outside the house was able to communicate with the key, allowing the researchers then to start the car parked out front and drive away.

A car won't open or start if the signal from its key takes too long to arrive, so the researchers devised a way to speed communication between their antennas. Most relay attacks require the signals to be converted from analog to digital and back, which takes time. The researchers were able to keep the signals in analog format, which reduced their delay from microseconds to nanoseconds and made their attack more difficult to detect.

The researchers suggest things that car owners and manufacturers can do to protect themselves. Car owners can shield their keys when they're not in use, to prevent attackers from communicating with them. Alternatively, manufacturers could add a button to fobs that would allow owners to deactivate and reactivate them. Capkun worries, however, that these types of solutions detract from the convenience that makes passive keyless entry systems worthwhile.
Ultimately, he says, manufacturers will need to add secure technology that allows the car to confirm that the key is in fact nearby. "I don't see a way around it," Capkun says. His group is actively working on protocols that would accomplish this.

David Wagner, a professor of computer science at the University of California at Berkeley who has studied the cryptographic systems used in keyless entry systems, says the research "should help car manufacturers improve auto security systems in the future."

Wagner doesn't think the research ought to make car owners anxious. "There are probably easier ways to steal cars," he says. But, he adds, a "nasty aspect of high-tech car theft" is that "it doesn't leave any sign of forced entry," so if a thief did use this method to steal a car, he says, it might be hard for police and insurance companies to get sufficient evidence of what happened. Wagner believes that manufacturers, police, and insurance companies all need to prepare for this eventuality.

"Automobiles are a key example of a system that is pervasively computerized," so they need to be thoroughly examined to ensure they are secure, says Tadayoshi Kohno, an assistant professor of computer science at the University of Washington. Kohno helped form the Center for Automotive Embedded Systems Security, which is dedicated to identifying and solving security problems with car security systems before they cause problems in the real world.

Source;
http://www.technologyreview.com/computing/27037/page1/?a=f