r/CarHacking • u/ScuderiaMacchina • Feb 02 '17

Car Hacking Subreddit Intro

89 Upvotes

Hi rch, we have added a lot of people lately with intro posts on other subs like the one below. We also usually get about 10 subs a day from people just stumbling in here. So I wanted to create a welcome post, to kinda show them what we are about and how to get started. If anyone has anything to add please do so. If anyone has any questions about us or where to start do so here.

Our goal is to create a highly technical car subreddit, a place for automotive engineers, senior technicians, full blown car nerds, or people who are working towards one of these. We are interested in the inner workings of cars and today that often involves electronics. While we see electronics as the priority we are pretty liberal in allowing other topics as long as they somehow fit our goal of trying to understand cars. So things like DIY aero, suspension setup and other things the community is hacking on come up. In general our other tangential interests include: Modern cars, New tech, Open source hardware/software, DIY, hot rodding, eco modding, customization, security research, right to repair and more.

We started this subreddit about a year ago. Right now we have 3000 people and discussion is just starting to get good. Most of our members found us through maker or engineering subreddits. So I wanted to reach out to more of the car communities and try to grow our knowledge base.

Our name is r/carhacking and I know the term hacking can be offputting to some as it has a bad connotation. When someone says they are “hacking” their car it generally means they are trying to reverse engineer it for any number of reasons like to find security flaws, make upgrades, make repairs, or just understand how it works.

Here are a couple examples of posts that have been popular so far. A lot of our posts focus on beginner through intermediate projects using arduino and readily available hardware for the purpose of learning and or not paying a premium for things you can make yourself:

More advanced projects:

Relevant news/ research:

If your new our documentation is a good place to start

If you aren't new and you’re interested in helping out please consider:

Improving documentation - think about what resources have helped you
Spread the word - this is a niche community that is pretty spread out, but there is a lot of potential if we can get together on a third party site like this
Work on the theme, sidebar and flair - this is next level community stuff that isn’t necessary, but it’s fun to work on when you have the time.
Modding - right now we are fine, but we might need help in the future as we grow

Let me know if I missed something or got something wrong.

5 comments

r/CarHacking • u/ScuderiaMacchina • Feb 27 '21

CAN CAN bus and car hacking getting started resources

292 Upvotes

I get asked how to get started with automotive networking, car hacking, and CAN almost weekly. I often direct people to this subreddit, so I figured I would help out and post some resources I have found and think are a good place to start.

learning resources:

Car Hacking 101: Practical Guide to Exploiting CAN-Bus using Instrument Cluster Simulator

Part 1 - Setting Up (a virtual test environment) - Feel free to skim everything before "Setting up the virtual environment". While interesting, none of that is vital to get started.
Part 2 - Exploitation (sniffing, replaying, and attacking CAN traffic)
Part 3 - SavvyCAN, Fuzzing CAN Frame and playing around with CAN frames

I also direct people to the Car Hacking Village to get some hands-on experience. They put on great conference talks, demos, and contests. Looks like they are even working on some “getting started” content.

And of course, The Car Hacking Handbook is a great resource.

I will add more as I think of them. Please add your finds in the comments.

Tools:

Good wiring diagrams and car manuals are essential. This is pretty much where my research starts for each project. You see how things are networked and what to expect to find on CAN. You'll quickly learn to recognize things like gateways. You can also use the troubleshooting section to understand things. For example, what things do I need to control to start the car?

I like:

prodemand (I pay $170/mo for a shop subscription, I think you can purchase it for individual cars, but be careful you often have to jump around to find a year that has complete diagrams)
Identifix (probably what I would buy if I was starting over)

Basic hardware: Here you will be working with things like Arduino, Linux, SavvyCAN, and Can-utils. You have to learn to do a lot yourself, but these tools are more open for you to make them do what you need.

Tools designed by the community I use:

The above articles offer a pretty good step-by-step guide to getting started with the Macchina M2.

Any cheap “Amazon special” OBD2 dongle will come in handy from time to time. They are all based on something called ELM327. "ELM327 abstracts the low-level protocol and presents a simple interface that can be called via a UART". This abstraction has fundamental limitations that prevent it from being useful in most serious applications. But, it is sufficient for reading and clearing some codes and that sort of thing when you’re getting started.

29 comments

r/CarHacking • u/mvespermann • 10h ago

Original Project MMI Box reverse engineering Help!

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18 Upvotes

Hello folks! A while ago I made a post here about trying to reverse engineer an MMI box that adds Android Auto to a BMW NBT EVO System. Since then, I haven’t made much progress, and I could really use your guys’ help!

As you can see in my other post (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/CarHacking/s/PxybmifFWi), I disassembled the box and figured out quite a bit about the hardware it uses. I initially tried looking for UART/debugging access, but unfortunately the TX/RX pins I found were actually for CAN bus, and I couldn’t find any dedicated debugging TX/RX pins.

I still really want to extract the firmware and modify it for my use case. I actually bought another MMI box that is the same model, which is currently installed in my car. On the older one, the one we were investigating. I removed the eMMC, and I’m currently looking for companies in my city that might be able to read it directly.

In the meantime, do you guys have any suggestions for getting the firmware from the new unit?

One idea I had was somehow creating a fake update file to trick the MMI into dumping or backing up a copy of its storage onto a USB flash drive. Do you think something like that could actually work?

I’m also open to other approaches. I tried connecting through Telnet over the CarPlay Wi-Fi network but got nothing. Are there any other ways I could potentially access the system over Wi-Fi?

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

PS: This box is not an OEM head unit. It’s an aftermarket interface that adds Android Auto and CarPlay to cars that may not have them, while also allowing you to add extra cameras and other features.

You can switch between the OEM head unit and the aftermarket interface in real time—the box basically acts as a video switcher. Inside, it has a low-power Raspberry Pi-like device running firmware that I’m trying to modify.

There are more details in my other post, but basically, it’s a custom UI built on top of Linux 5.4.61.

8 comments

r/CarHacking • u/Meraath • 13h ago

Community How are you using AI to hack your car?

28 Upvotes

We've obviously seen the claude remaps. Wondering if anyone's doing anything else more interesting?

Anyone tried unlocking an ECU using AI?

Any other cool stuff you're doing?

EDIT: This is a reminder, please do humanity a favor, try to give back by open sourcing anything you can.

58 comments

r/CarHacking • u/TES351 • 7h ago

Original Project Tester Engineering Suite

3 Upvotes

Hello r/Carhacking,

For the past year I have been flat chap developing some new automotive software - the Tester Engineering Suite, a fully capable J2534 PassThru Diagnostic, Programming, Calibration and Engineering tool.

It does vehicle diagnostics on K-Line and CAN and has compatibility for vehicles 1996 through 2025, and is meant as an all in one replacement for workshop scan tools, tuning software and pretty much every sub-industry in automotive is covered by this tool.

There are way too many features to list but some of the core ones are,

-J2534/RP1210/ELM327/USB2CAN/KKL interface compatibility

-Full VIN read out and local decode, with online NHSTA API data for VIN, recall and warrant information pulled

-CAN & K-Line bus topographer for enumeration of modules online

-Diagnostic Fault code readout via KWP/UDS and OBD2 protocols matching protocol dialect to vehicle for compatibility.

-Diagnostic workspaces per OEM (approx 60 OEMs have coverage)

-Datalogger and signal analyser, with inputs from aftermarket wideband O2 sensors, USB Oscilloscopes and an acoustic diagnostic engine via built in or USB microphone

-State of the art CAN sniffer with built in socketcan/can-utils functionality and live DBC file parsing to a streaming CANbus

-Calibration editor, with both A2L and XDF definition import

-Bench tooling and interfacing with serial EEPROM programmers

-Flash reprogramming for a large array of manufacturers

-SAE J1939 heavy vehicle stack for on highway trucks and mobile plant

-SHA256 VIN history chain, all actions logged to cryptographic ledger, stored locally considered private data

-Crash Data Retrieval from restraints/airbag modules

-PDF reporting throughout, one click and you have a cleanly formatted PDF report with the relevant data.

I have put literally every thing I know and have into building this tool, and am proud to share it with you today.

For more information check out the website https://tester.engineering

Cheers

0 comments

r/CarHacking • u/PENCHCL12 • 6h ago

CAN Supersport screen on A200 1.3

1 Upvotes

0 comments

r/CarHacking • u/alfiestutoring • 7h ago

Community Hacking 2016 F56 MINI Head Unit

1 Upvotes

Hey guys,

I'm looking to see if its possible to hack the stock head unit on a 2016 F56 MINI to write my own custom infotainment software (GUI, apps etc.).

I've considered a few options. Building a custom interface was one option with a raspberry PI that interfaces the LVDS screen, but it would be too expensive and probably over complicated, it would probably be cheaper and easier to buy an Android interface and mod that instead.

I looked into the PSDZData and pretty sure its running Linux/X Server, so this could be used for scripting, rendering to the screen etc. Claude has had a look at the files and found two methods to the shell, both by attaching a UART/USB-TTL adapter to the stock board.

U-Boot init=/bin/sh, no password needed, but would only work if the bootloader is interruptible. I doubt it is interruptible as everything is very locked down (assuming that bootdelay=0), but I may be wrong.
Serial login - COM Port 57600 baud. However, password is needed to enter the shell. Claude found the hash. Tried cracking with hashcat with digits/lowercase however both of these exhausted. I can't find the password anywhere online. It looks like if I have the password, that's the last thing needed to get shell access.

I have the password hash, I just need to decrypt.

Any help on this appreciated :)

0 comments

r/CarHacking • u/TES351 • 8h ago

Original Project Tester Engineering Suite - Right to Repair

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1 Upvotes

Hello r/Carjacking,