If that device have been to leak or be bought on-line—Rodriguez himself says he does not plan to publish his—he says anybody may use it to jailbreak their very own plate in a matter of minutes. “They simply want to attach a cable and set up the brand new firmware, identical to if you happen to have been jailbreaking your iPhone,” Rodriguez says.
Rodriguez additionally notes that his hacking approach might be used not simply by a driver who needs to jailbreak their very own plate, but additionally by somebody focusing on an unwitting proprietor of a plate too. If a hacker—or a parking valet or auto mechanic—may handle to take away a license plate and set up their very own firmware on it, Rodriguez warns, they may surreptitiously monitor a driver and even change their license plate quantity over the web by programming the plate to connect with a server the hacker managed.
In addition to the bodily entry and time mandatory to tug off that hack, nevertheless, a license plate saboteur would additionally want to beat a characteristic of Reviver’s plates that sends a notification to the proprietor when it is indifferent from a automobile. That would require jamming the plate’s radio communications whereas tampering with it, Rodriguez notes, an added wrinkle that makes the assault even much less sensible, although maybe not not possible.
Rodriguez is not the primary to hack Reviver’s techniques. In 2022, safety researcher Sam Curry discovered vulnerabilities within the firm’s internet infrastructure that allowed him to make himself an administrator in its backend database, with the power to trace or change license plates at will. Unlike Rodriguez’s {hardware} hacking, nevertheless, Reviver was in a position to rapidly patch its web-based bugs to stop Curry’s approach.
Although Curry’s internet hacking technique was far simpler to tug off previous to Reviver’s patch than Rodriguez’s {hardware} hacking, he says that Rodriguez’s technique would probably maintain actual enchantment for sure scofflaw drivers, who may wish to jailbreak their Reviver plates or just purchase pre-jailbroken plates on-line. “If you wish to swap your license plate quantity, James Bond fashion, then drive at loopy speeds or one thing, you possibly can change it for just a few hours and alter it again with out even pulling right into a parking storage,” says Curry. “The people who find themselves inflicting havoc on the highway would most likely be into this.”
Digital license plates are at the moment authorized to purchase and register in California, Arizona, and Michigan, with many extra states contemplating legalizing them in years to return. As that rollout continues, Rodriguez and Curry argue that license plate makers, transit regulators, and legislation enforcement all should be conscious that any system that depends solely on license plates as an identifier could also be prone to digital license plate hacking—with probably chaotic penalties.
“You ought to assume folks will mess with them,” says Curry. “And folks want to simply accept the implications of that.”
