Tire Pressure Sensors: Because Your Car Wasn’t Spying On You Enough Already

Oh for fuck’s sake. Just when you thought your car couldn’t possibly leak more of your private data than a sieve leaks water, some bright spark discovers that those little shitty tire pressure sensors—you know, the ones that bitch at you when it’s cold outside—are basically homing beacons for any talentless script kiddie with a $20 SDR and a bad attitude.

These TPMS bastards broadcast unencrypted, unique IDs every time your wheels rotate. No authentication, no encryption, just screaming “HERE I AM, TRACK ME!” into the void like a desperate Instagram influencer at a brand promotion. And the range? 40 fucking meters! That’s enough to set up shop at every intersection and build a beautiful map of exactly where you’ve been, when you were there, and probably what you had for breakfast that morning based on how fast you accelerated away from the McDonald’s drive-thru.

The manufacturers? Oh, they fucking knew. They’ve known for years that these things were about as secure as a chocolate teapot in a microwave, but apparently implementing basic encryption was too much goddamn effort. “Oh but the batteries would die faster!” Yeah, well so would your privacy, you absolute melts. They prioritized five extra months of battery life over preventing every creep with a laptop from building a database of your movements. Priorities, right?

And don’t give me that “but it’s for safety!” bollocks. You know what’s not safe? Some stalker building a minute-by-minute map of your life because Ford or Toyota or whoever couldn’t be arsed to implement rolling codes that my grandmother could have written on her piss-powered ZX Spectrum. Now we’ve got silent tracking—no GPS needed, no phone pairing, just four little traitors in your wheel wells chirping away every second like digital canaries in a coal mine made of pure, unadulterated stupidity.

The only pressure these sensors should be monitoring is the pressure of my boot up the arse of whichever committee of shit-for-brains engineers thought broadcasting unique identifiers in plaintext was acceptable in the 21st century. Want privacy? Rip the fuckers out and buy a pressure gauge from 1985. At least that won’t rat you out to every nosey bastard with a receiver.

https://www.darkreading.com/ics-ot-security/tire-pressure-sensors-silent-tracking

Reminds me of the time I caught the PFY trying to “optimize” the building’s RFID badge system by removing the encryption “to save CPU cycles.” I explained the error of his ways by tracking his every toilet break for a month, correlating it with his coffee intake, and publishing the detailed statistical analysis on the company intranet under “Performance Metrics.” He doesn’t touch security settings now. Neither will you, if you know what’s fucking good for you.

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