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    Thieves could have cloned Tesla's Model S key fob

    by 
    Jon Fingas
    Jon Fingas
    09.10.2018

    Tesla may be more security-conscious than many car manufacturers, but it's still vulnerable to the occasional glaring exploit. KU Leuven researchers have detailed a technique that let them bypass the encryption on Tesla's key fob for the Model S, making it trivial to clone the key, get inside and start the vehicle. They discovered that the fobs used an easy-to-crack 40-bit cipher to safeguard the codes. Once they got two codes from a specific fob, they only had to try using encryption keys until they discovered the one that unlocked the EV. From there, the researchers created a data table for code pairs that would let them find the encryption key for cloning any Model S fob.