Since FLV is on indefinite “personal” leave, it’s a good thing college students have picked up the slack on vehicle security, inexpensive, easy to use and NO SUBSCRIPTION!!! Ford Next should just shut down and write off canopy before they waste more billions.
From Matthew Dolan at Freep:
This relatively simple device could be a game-changer for protecting your car.
A research team from the University of Michigan is targeting your car's or truck's auxiliary power outlet — known to older folks as the outlet for the cigarette lighter — as a portal to help safeguard your vehicle from cyberhacking and other forms of mishap and theft.
With a $1.2 million grant from the National Science Foundation, the university-led computer science and engineering team will launch large-scale testing of Battery Sleuth, a vehicle security system that bypasses both the wireless communication that key fobs depend on and the standardized onboard communication network
Instead, it verifies the real drivers by measuring voltage fluctuations in a vehicle's electrical system. Drivers receive clearance to start their vehicles after entering the right security code through a keypad device plugged into the auxiliary power outlet.
"The great thing about the power outlet is its simplicity — it's just a wire connected to the battery, so there's nothing to hack," said Kang Shin, the Kevin and Nancy O'Connor Professor of Computer Science at U-M and lead researcher on the project. " And creating voltage fluctuations with components like windshield wipers or door locks is even simpler."
Installed between a vehicle's battery and the car's electrical system, Battery Sleuth allows the battery to deliver enough current to power systems like electronics and lights, but not enough to power the vehicle's starter until the right code is entered.
"The idea of measuring fluctuations in a car's electrical system seems simple, but designing one device that can do it accurately on thousands of different vehicle models in varying environmental conditions gets quite complicated," said Liang He, assistant professor of computer science and engineering at the University of Colorado, Denver and a researcher on the project.
Battery Sleuth also has a siren that blares if there is unauthorized entry is detected. If a potential thief tries to hook up another power source, the system's resistor shuts down the vehicle's electrical system.
"Vehicle theft costs drivers and insurance companies more than $4 billion each year in the United States alone, and that's partly because today's vehicles use a hodge-podge of computer systems that were never designed to work together," Shin said.
In a field test study on eight vehicles published in July 2022, the researchers showed that a prototype of Battery Sleuth was nearly completely effective at detecting and preventing illegitimate activity without interfering with normal operation. The team plans to use the new grant to fund more extensive testing at U-M's Mcity test facility.
At the end of the three-year project, the team hopes to have a commercially viable prototype that can be scaled up to production, first as a theft deterrent device, and maybe later as a complete vehicle entry and control system to replace vehicle keys and fobs.