Researchers at IMDEA Networks Institute, together with European partners, have found that tire pressure sensors in modern cars can unintentionally expose drivers to tracking. Over a ten-week study, they collected signals from more than 20,000 vehicles, revealing a hidden privacy risk and highlighting the need for stronger security measures in future vehicle sensor systems. Most...
Depends on the attacker. The GPS is better if you have access to the car, but getting that is hard. Any idiot with a radio can read the TPMS sensors of every car going by - there is nothing that even slows them down.
That idiot would be better off just using a camera and capture the license plates…hell, they can even do that from even further away. Using the ID of TPMS for tracking is probably the least effective or usable way to track vehicles of the literal dozen of much better ways.
Camera has to have LOS to the car’s license plate, it’s got a limited field of view, it’s blocked or obscured by bad weather and other objects. You need to have some compute power with the camera to run the OCR to get the LP number from the image. People can easily (although not legally) switch their plates up.
Meanwhile, reading the radio signals can be done with rather small, innocuous looking hardware, it can capture many signals at once and even capture them through objects, without LOS to the TPMS, and in all kinds of weather.
Each method has it’s advantages and disadvantages, and it would be foolish to ignore one simply because it does not have the same capabilities as the other.
Depends on the attacker. The GPS is better if you have access to the car, but getting that is hard. Any idiot with a radio can read the TPMS sensors of every car going by - there is nothing that even slows them down.
That idiot would be better off just using a camera and capture the license plates…hell, they can even do that from even further away. Using the ID of TPMS for tracking is probably the least effective or usable way to track vehicles of the literal dozen of much better ways.
Camera has to have LOS to the car’s license plate, it’s got a limited field of view, it’s blocked or obscured by bad weather and other objects. You need to have some compute power with the camera to run the OCR to get the LP number from the image. People can easily (although not legally) switch their plates up.
Meanwhile, reading the radio signals can be done with rather small, innocuous looking hardware, it can capture many signals at once and even capture them through objects, without LOS to the TPMS, and in all kinds of weather.
Each method has it’s advantages and disadvantages, and it would be foolish to ignore one simply because it does not have the same capabilities as the other.