A student with a laptop and a radio stopped four high-speed trains. The crypto keys hadn’t been changed in 19 years.
TL;DR
A 23-year-old hacked Taiwan’s high-speed rail with a laptop and cheap radios, exploiting crypto keys unchanged for 19 years.
At 23:23 on 5 April, a 23-year-old university student in Taichung transmitted a falsified General Alarm signal into the Taiwan High Speed Rail Corporation’s internal radio system. Four trains travelling at up to 300 km/h received the highest-priority emergency alert and switched to manual braking. The entire high-speed rail network was disrupted for 48 minutes. The student, identified only by his surname Lin, had cracked through seven layers of verification using a laptop, a software-defined radio he bought online, and a handful of handheld radios. The cryptographic keys protecting the system had not been changed in 19 years.
The radio system Lin compromised is TETRA (Terrestrial Trunked Radio), a standard developed in the 1990s for encrypted voice and data communication, used by police, emergency services, airports, and transport networks in...
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