Problems have been found with them before. Wireless OBD-II dongles are available for as little as $30, and they're usually paired with a mobile app. Over the last few years, there’s been a flood of cheap wireless OBD-II dongles introduced to the market. “My vehicle started to behave abnormally.” Every Device Vulnerable “I found it’s very dangerous behavior,” Wen says. Then he connected to the dongle with his laptop and sent random commands – an exercise known as fuzzing – that were funneled to the vehicle’s CAN bus, which is essentially the brain of the vehicle. In one of their experiments, Wen took his Honda Civic to an empty lot with a dongle plugged into it. The findings suggest consumers should be cautious with wireless OBD dongles until their security improves.

Wen and his advisers, Professor Zhiqiang Lin of Ohio State University and Qi Alfred Chen of the University of California, Irvine, will present their findings on Thursday at the 29th Usenix Security Symposium. Wen wanted to see if wireless OBD-II dongles, which can run Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or Bluetooth Low Energy, were vulnerable to attack.

Obd wifi vs bluetooth