Vehicle Tire Pressure Sensors Enable Silent Tracking

Researchers from universities in Spain, Switzerland, and Luxembourg demonstrated that tire pressure monitoring system (TPMS) sensors in vehicles can be exploited for silent tracking. Using low-cost ~$100 spectrum receivers, they captured over six million TPMS transmissions from ~20,000 vehicles over 10 weeks. The core vulnerability: TPMS sensors broadcast unique, unchanging IDs in unencrypted cleartext with no authentication, allowing anyone within 50 meters to intercept and correlate signals to track specific vehicles. Mandated in the US since 2007, TPMS cannot be disabled without compromising vehicle safety, making this a persistent and unfixable privacy risk for most drivers.