Owners of fixed-code garage door openers might want to consider upgrading them because a researcher has developed a technique that guesses the numbers in seconds.

To showcase the new attack, which he dubbed Open Sesame, security researcher Samy Kamkar reprogrammed a children’s toy designed for short-distance texting called Radica Girl Tech IM-me because it has all the needed wireless components and because “it’s pink,” his favorite color.

With a fixed-code garage door opener, the remote control, or “clicker” always transmits the same 8 to 12-bit binary code. For a 12-bit code, there are 4,096 possible combinations—strings of 1s and 0s.

The fact that openers’ fixed-codes can be cracked through brute-force is a known issue, but doing so was believed to take longer. A typical clicker resends the same code 5 times, with a transmission time of 2 milliseconds per bit and an additional wait time of 2 milliseconds between each bit.

By Kamkar’s calculations, following this process to iterate through all possible combinations for 8, 9, 10, 11 and 12-bit codes would take 29 minutes.

Read the Full Article: Source – PC World
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2932339/hacker-turns-toy-into-tool-that-can-open-garage-doors-in-seconds.html

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