Yes. There is an app to tell if you have an Airtag transmitting around you.

 

I just tried this. I put the key fob on the roof of the other car. About 4 feet away from the driver's door. It won't even allow the door to be unlocked. How does Thief 2 receive a signal if the key fob doesn't have that range?

 

Think of this in simple terms

The Corvettes RX range is limited to a few feet
The thieves tools have a much greater RX range

They catch (RX) & then retransmit (TX) the FOB signal to their partner who is within a few feet of the car to unlock/start it. Think of the thieves tool like a hearing aide for elders

Hence why they can “catch” the signal much further away then your Corvette can. Theres quite many events of stolen vehicles caught on RING and Home DVR surveillance to prove this is the case

 

That's the "man in the middle" attack and there are many ways to defend against it - which GM obviously hasn't bothered with.

Kill switch (Soler controller?) might be the best defense post-manufacturing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack

 

You think Thief 2 has equipment that can transmit 30 feet and the fob has the 30 foot range to transmit the signal back to thief 2 also? If he is behind the wall, maybe. 30 feet through a couple of walls and whatever is in the way?

 

I just watched a YT video of a guy who called the police because his backpack was stolen and he traced it to a house with his AirTag. The police showed up asap and recovered the backpack and arrested the offender, pretty simple stuff really. What city do you live in that the police wouldn’t help you go get your stolen corvette back?!

Here is a link to said video! If you traced your car within hours of it being stolen you might be lucky enough to not have to make an insurance claim.

 

I don't like those videos since they often have a lot of idle chatter. Regardless, I have seen the news articles. More importantly, I WAS THAT GUY 20 OVER YEARS AGO. Perp stole stuff from the truck. Called the cops, they took a report and basically said that I should not hold my breath. We checked cell phone bill since one item was my cell phone. Sure enough, it was used. Cops added it to the report. I did some work and found who he called, talked to them and they said it was a wrong number they were talking to for 5 minutes. Cops finally took over once they thought I might be wandering down that way. Long story short, dad gave up Junior. I went to court to see what happens. Dad wanted to make a deal but it was too late since I cashed the insurance check. Items were held by the cops as evidence but a quick glance didn't make me want it back. Took the check and bought new stuff. What did my efforts net me? Whole lot of nothing. I could have just cashed the check without the whole thing. Yep. Not that idealistic anymore. Yes the police will help but they're understaffed as always. Maybe in Mayberry they have nothing better to do but why again?

"IF". If you are lucky enoughnand they take care of it while stealing it, it probably won't be coming home with you. I don't think a car will be that easy, I don't think. Car is not like luggage. It probably will not be in the condition you left it in. Insurance might want to fix it and if it isn't as right as it was going out, well, I guess that's your problem. Rather than risk that, I'd rather not have the car back and start anew. My dogs and wife, sure. This is just a car and I don’t want to deal with the aggravation of having to restore it when I can buy newer and better. As said, this is probably going to be a pro thief and not some luggage thief. They spend money to steal it and probably have a way to dispose of it fast. I'm not interested in getting it back unless you can assure me it will be in the shape it left.

 

Electrical Engineer here (hardware design engineer, to be specific)...

As Creep mentioned, the sensitivity of your car's receiver is fairly low, hence the "range" is only a handful of feet... but that doesn't mean the fob signal isn't strong enough to be detected by a more sensitive receiver, and this is exactly what the thieves have. And highly-directional receivers (the antennas, actually) aren't expensive by a long shot, especially when they can aim it by hand/eye ($50-$100 for even half-assed versions). Transmitters are even easier because you don't even have to be directional, you can just blast the signal with a lot more power to make up for the omni-directional design.

In fact, that's a common technique of thieves... here's how it works:

• Swamp the airwaves with a high signal level so your car can't recognize any valid signal
• You press the fob button, they capture your fob's transmission, but car doesn't recognize it
• So you press again (or fob does it automatically)... they capture the second transmission, car still doesn't recognize it
• They stop swamping the airwaves and replay the first... car unlocks, you don't think twice
• You walk away, they replay the second transmission, car unlocks and they now own it

 

Hmmm. Interesting scenario. I pull my fob out of the faraday pouch and no recognition, even though it worked fine a few minutes before. So, a couple of possibilities are that the battery/fob just died, or someone is jamming the system. It might be an opportunity to have a look around for suspects.

 

I read these stories and I get crazy thoughts. First of all, don't lock your car with the fob when in public. Hit the door button. Secondly, why don't they have biometric ignition yet? Fingerprint readers are cheap, accurate, and simple. Retina scanners are coming down in price.

Now the crazy. I want to invent an offensive device. Maybe some kind of contraption hidden under the steering column that can be remotely activated to punch the driver in the crotch repeatedly until they either pass out or get out.

Or, install an airbag in the headrest that can also be remotely activated to slam the drivers head into the steering wheel.

If you're a thief, you're scum. Try and steal my car. I dare you. Never mess with crazy.

 

Not sure. Rolling code maybe? I'm kinda skeptical about it myself. I personally don't believe the key fob has that good range of 30 feet. Maybe if it is a straight path with no obstruction but it's in a bowl among 5 other fobs inside a drawer behind a couple of walls. You open the garage door, I'll know and might be in fear for my immediate safety.

 

Crazy is so appropriate a description. When you spend $10000 to save a few hundred bucks, that's what I call crazy. Last 40 years, I have not had any car stolen from me. So far, I think the odds are in my favor. Low chances of occurring and how much do you think you will spend to design and build and test that contraption? Car gets stolen, insurance pays what the current market value is less a small deductible. I'd definitely have to check with lawyers about the liability of this thing. Legal fees alone will be more than my deductible. I pay for insurance so I can mitigate my risks and not worry. As I said to my wife, "I'd I am going to worry, I might as well keep the money."

 

At least someone here understands my language 😎
Im a former Navy Crypto and signals intelligence (NSA) guy myself

 

So what is the range of the key fob?

 

Depends on many things. The strength of the cars antenna, the antenna in the key fob, the conditions, the battery strength in the fobs.

I used to work in Driver Authorization systems before I did Steering. Radio antennas are a black art to some degree. If you ever want more range, you can put the key fob pointed at your chin (not away) and use your skull as an attenuation device.

While all of the things discussed in this thread are technically true some fobs do use rolling codes or a seed/key handshake that unless you crack the algorithm you can't steal the code (playing back a repeat doesn't work).

Regardless at the end of the day if someone can gain physical access to your car with a service tool (OEM or otherwise) and the appropriate OEM software they can make new keys for your car. Sometimes they need a 5 digit code to do this, sometimes not.

Older cars are easier to copy, newer cars are harder, Cyber Security became a huge industry push in 2018, and any newly designed car architecture from 2022 has significantly more Cyber Security than previous ones. In fact there are now regulations in Europe and China OEMs have to meet (2024 was the first year).

 

I'll take these one by one (I don't often get to the C7 forums since I traded in for my current C8, but I have checked this thread a few times since it's in my wheelhouse)...
The more proper question here is "What is the range of the car's receiver?", but I take your meaning. As LT mentions just above, it's actually multiple things. Antennas have a sensitivity, which basically measures how quiet of a signal it can "hear" (or how loud it can "speak", in the case of transmitting antennas)... for a specific frequency (if memory serves, the C7 fob uses the ~434MHz band), a smaller antenna (well, smaller than ~1/4 of the wavelength, about 173mm) will have less sensitivity. Fob antennas are pretty small so they can fit in your hand... usually on the order of ~30mm, so not as sensitive as you would like. The antenna in your car can be larger... but they're often not. Battery strength can also determine how strong you transmit, but that generally isn't noticeable in any modern design until the battery is near the end of its life. Weather and temp even have an effect.

In a nutshell, though, ~25'-35' is generally a safe bet in clear conditions (open field, good weather, etc.).
An attenuator would reduce range, not add to it. The chin "trick" has been around many many years, but here's the science behind it (and why it can just as often have a negative effect on range as a positive one). Antennas need a ground plane to work (I'm simplifying to a degree here), and you can tune an antenna by changing the capacitance associated with it. Guess what humans are? Yeah, we're big bags of mostly water (Star Trek reference there, if no one caught it), which is essentially a walking capacitor. When you place the fob against your skull, your detuning the as-built antenna, pulling it towards a slightly different frequency (a few kHz change, in general). Fobs are mass produced items that may not be exactly on the as-designed frequency, so by de-tuning it slightly with your fat head, you're pulling it close to the as-designed frequency and getting a bit more range out of it. OR, your de-tuning it in the wrong direction and losing some range. Unless you've measured your fob's center frequency, you don't know which direction you're pulling it, towards the as-designed or away from it. Crap shoot.
I can't say I've paid much attention to the cheapest vehicles on the market these days, but any fob for a $30k+ vehicle these days is going to be using a rolling code. I will say some of the lower-end vehicles are using codes where the algorithm has been known for well more than a decade. Either way, playback does work in many cases, if you're able to disrupt the receipt of earlier signals (as I mentioned in an earlier post).
They don't even need a service tool... the CANbus hack tools they're using these days on a lot of higher-end vehicles make it pretty easy.
While I would agree that every generation is more secure than the last, the auto industry is at least a decade (honestly, I'd say two decades) behind the cyber community... and that's no good when it comes to securing something against hackers. The better fobs these days have 256-bit AES encryption... whoop dee doo. That means nothing with today's portable hacking tools. And the designers leave huge holes in their systems that allow you to just bypass it in the first place, so it's marketing speak with no teeth in the real world.

 

I do... things... to other things... that may have come from places I would never vacation.

 

you should do those things……to the thieves…..in advance…..to prevent c7’s from being stolen

 

We aren't worried about theft at this point honestly with Cyber Security, that's not to say we don't care about theft, but you can only do so much. And mass stealing cars is one thing but mass control of cars is another.

Most of the Cyber Security operates around updating software or hacking CAN (which is why a lot of those CAN Hack tools will stop working on newer cars). In fact on a lot of new cars you can't even easily access the CAN Bus on the OBD (you need to hack into a wiring harness).

Remote protection is the focus. Because if I can remotely control your car, do I really need your key?

 

Many of the CANbus guys are hacking into a wire harness (often behind the headlight and other readily accessible areas). The security of the entire network (whether it's CAN or other) is often an afterthought, even when coming from a working group... and that's unfortunate.