How to hack a car — a quick crash-course

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The goal of this article is to get you started hacking cars — fast, cheap, and easy. In order to do this, we’ll spoof the RPM gauge as an example.

The following is by no means an exhaustive tutorial. It instead aims to provide just enough information to get you up and running. If you want to dig deeper you can checkout the must-reads at the end.

If you decide to carry out this tutorial in real life, you’ll need a Linux computer (or a virtual Linux machine), and a CAN-to-USB device (which we’ll look into later).

A car is a network

A car consists of multiple computers to control the engine, transmission, windows, locks, lights, etc. These computers are called electronic control units (ECU) and communicate with each other over a network.

For example, when you press the button on your steering wheel to increase the volume of the radio, the steering wheel ECU sends a command to increase volume onto the network, the radio ECU then sees this command and acts accordingly.

There are multiple networks in a car, generally at least two:

One for critical data such as engine and powertrain messages

And one for less critical data such as radio and door locks

The critical network uses a fast and reliable protocol whereas the non-critical network uses a slower, less reliable but cheaper protocol. The number of networks as well as which ECUs are networked together depends on the car make, model and year. An ECU could also be connected to multiple networks.

 

Reference link : https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/hacking-cars-a-guide-tutorial-on-how-to-hack-a-car-5eafcfbbb7ec/

 

Connecting to a network

 

Some networks can be accessed via the OBD-II port. OBD-II is mandatory on all cars and light trucks built in the US after 1996 and Europe after 2004.

The connector is in arms reach of the driver’s seat. You might need to lift off some plastic cover but it is always accessible without tools.

 

 

Software

To communicate with the device you need to install the can-utils package on your Linux machine. You can do this via by typing the following into the Linux prompt:

sudo apt-get install can-utils

Can-utils makes it extremely easy to send, receive and analyze CAN packets. These are the commands that we will use.

• cansniffer display only the packets that are changing
• candump dump all received packets
• cansend send a packet

Linux has CAN support built in to the kernel via SocketCAN. This makes it easy to write your own additional programs. You can interact with the CAN bus in the same way you would interact with any other network i.e. via sockets.