PCB Design Review: Tinysparrow, A Module For CAN Hacking Needs

I enjoy seeing modules that can make designing other devices easier, and when I did a call for design reviews, [enp6s0] has submitted one such board to us. It’s a module called TinySparrow (G…

Extracting SecOC Keys From A 2021 Toyota RAV4 Prime

With the recently introduced SecOC (Secure Onboard Communication) standard, car manufacturers seek to make the CAN bus networks that form the backbone of modern day cars more secure. This standard …

A Dashboard Outside The Car

One of the biggest upsides of open communications standards such as CAN or SPI is that a whole world of vehicle hacking becomes available, from simple projects like adding sensors or computers to a…

Unbricking Trains, Uncovering Shady Behavior

The first clue was that a number of locomotives started malfunctioning with exactly 1,000,000 km on the odometer. And when the company with the contract for servicing them couldn’t figure out…

ESP32 Used As Wireless CAN Bus Reader

The CAN bus, accessible through the OBD-II port, is the channel that holds all the secrets of the modern automobile. If you want to display those for your own perusal, you might consider this nifty…

Get MOST Into Your Pi

When looking the modify a passenger vehicle, the Controller Area Network (CAN) bus is a pretty easy target. In modern vehicles it has access to most of the on-board systems — everything from …

Car Security System Monitors Tiny Voltage Fluctuations

As the old saying goes, there’s no such thing as a lock that can’t be picked. However, it seems like there are plenty of examples of car manufacturers that refuse to add these metaphori…

Sufficiently Advanced Tech: Has Bugs

Arthur C. Clarke said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”. He was a sci-fi writer, though, and not a security guy. Maybe it should read “Any sufficiently adv…

This Week In Security: QueueJumper, JS VM2 Escape, And CAN Hacking

You may not be familiar with the Microsoft Message Queuing (MSMQ) service, a store and forward sort of inter-process and inter-system communication service. MSMQ has become something of a legacy pr…

RV-Bridge Takes HomeKit To The Open Road

In the world of proprietary protocol darkness, it’s comforting to see that the RV realm (Recreational Vehicle, also known as a motorhome) has mostly settled on RV-C, an open protocol that let…

This ESP32 CAN!

Since modern cars use the CAN bus for so many of their functions, it’s unsurprising that it’s a frequent object of interest for those in our community. Some people go no further than co…

Probing CAN Bus For EV Battery Info

The widespread adoption of the CAN bus (and OBD-II) in automobiles was largely a way of standardizing the maintenance of increasingly complicated engines and their needs to meet modern emissions st…

UART Can’t? Arduino CANSerial Can!

[Jacob Geigle] had a problem. A GPS unit and a Bluetooth-to-serial were tying up all the hardware UARTs on an AVR Arduino project. “Software serial”, I hear you say. But what if I told you [Jacob] …

Volvo C30 Custom Gauge And CAN Bus Reverse Engineering

With cars being essentially CAN buses on wheels, it’s no wonder that there’s a lot of juicy information about the car’s status zipping about on these buses. The main question is u…

Hacking A Proper Dash Into The Tesla Model 3

The Tesla Model 3 and Model Y are popular electric vehicles that dispense with some of the usual provisions you’d expect in a typical car. Namely, there’s no dash cluster in front of th…

Baby Steps Toward DIY Autonomous Driving: VW Golf Edition

[Willem Melching] owns a 2010 Volkswagen Golf – a very common vehicle in Europe – and noticed that whilst the electronic steering rack supports the usual Lane Keep Assist (LKAS) system,…

Annoy Yourself Into Better Driving With This Turn Signal Monitor

Something like 99% of the people on the road at any given moment will consider themselves an above-average driver, something that’s as statistically impossible as it is easily disproven by ca…

Simplify 3D Printer Wiring With CAN Bus

[mark] had an interesting idea when looking at all the wiring of a typical 3D printer; Use CAN Bus. There are a lot of wires going to the extruder assembly, and with most designs this thing is flyi…

Don’t Sleep On The Lawn, There’s An AI-Powered, Flamethrower-Wielding Robot About

You know how it goes, you’re just hanging out in the yard, there aren’t enough hours in the day, and weeding the lawn is just such a drag. Then an idea just pops into your head. How abo…

Custom Instrument Cluster For Aging Car

All of the technological improvements to vehicles over the past few decades have led to cars and trucks that would seem borderline magical to anyone driving something like a Ford Pinto in the 1970s…