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If that tool were leaked or sold online – Rodríguez himself says he has no intention of publishing his – he says anyone could use it to jailbreak their own board in minutes. “They just need to connect a cable and install the new firmware, as if you were jailbreaking your iPhone,” says Rodriguez.
Rodriguez also notes that his hacking technique could be used not only by a driver who wants to jailbreak his own plate, but also by someone targeting an unwitting owner of a plate as well. If a hacker — or a parking valet or a car mechanic — could manage to remove a license plate and install their own firmware on it, Rodriguez warns, they could surreptitiously track a driver or even change their license number. on the Internet by programming the license plate. to connect to a server controlled by the hacker.
In addition to the physical access and time required to remove that hack, however, a license plate saboteur would also need to overcome a Reviver plate feature that notifies the owner when it is detached from a vehicle. . This would require disrupting the radio communications of the plate while handling, notes Rodriguez, an additional wrinkle that makes the attack even less practical, although it is not impossible.
Rodriguez isn’t the first to hack Reviver’s systems. In 2022, security researcher Sam Curry found it vulnerabilities in the company’s web infrastructure which allowed him to make himself an administrator in his backend database, with the ability to track or change license plates at will. Unlike Rodriguez’s hardware hack, however, Reviver was able to quickly patch his web-based bugs to prevent Curry’s technique.
Although Curry’s web hacking method was much easier to pull off before the Reviver patch than Rodriguez’s hardware hacking, he says Rodriguez’s method could have real appeal for some scofflaw drivers, who might want to jailbreak their Reviver plates or just buy pre-jailbroken plates. online. “If you want to change your license number, James Bond style, then drive at crazy speeds or something, you can change it for a few hours and change it back without even pulling into a garage,” says Curry. “People who cause freaks on the street will probably be in it.”
Digital license plates are currently legal to purchase and register in California, Arizona and Michigan, with many more states considering legalization in the coming years. While the rollout continues, Rodriguez and Curry argue that licensing manufacturers, transit regulators and law enforcement need to be aware that any system that relies solely on license plates as an identifier can be susceptible to digital license piracy, with potentially chaotic consequences. .
“You have to assume that people will put up with them,” Curry says. “And people have to accept the implications of that.”
