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I personally tune ford cars or modify the factory binary files used by the cars ECM. recently a company has developed a way to connect to the car via OBD2 port and read the file off of the ECM. they then can modify it and re flash it to the ECM.

as such thousands of hours of my hard work will be up for grabs by anyone. I am looking to protect my work and not harm any cars in the process. as well as tuning cars I am an IT professional and am working with a programmer to accomplish this task. just thought I would ask here to get some basic information.

items I know: the computer uses a Binary file with a header. it is a .bin file, the ECM actively reads the binary to operate the engine and other parameters in real time.

is there a way to encrypt the file so that the ECU can read it but if an outside source tries to read / remove / alter the file it would be encrypted or locked?

Kriem
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user3465788
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  • You can't stop them reading it but you can make it difficult. Eg corrupt the osid so standard packages don't know how to edit it. Nothing stopping them copying it completely though. Drm is always crackable able with enough time. – rollsch Aug 09 '17 at 12:39
  • btw, is there any way to read ECU .bin files (as human readable) and make changes. etc. ? Looking tor something that helps me changing my car's file without any cost of going to dealer and paying him for that. I'm new to this cars things, so any direction/guidance appreciated. – Zeeshan Nov 05 '20 at 03:03

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The ECU would need to have the ability to de-code whatever type of encryption you used in the first place otherwise it won't be able to make any use of it. This would probably appear as a bad/corrupted ECU flash.

As far as I know, no one is hard coding OTF encryption into their ECUs.

If you somehow added to the ECU code to allow for OTF encryption, someone could simply dump your BIN file and read the un-encrypted portion that the ECU would run to decrypt your tuning. This would probably be enough to reverse engineer your encryption technique and give them access to your tuning. I would suggest not trying to add encryption code to the ECU programming, the ECU was never designed to run such things.

I think this sounds like a scenario where someone has found a better way to achieve something, in this case flash ECUs. This makes it easier to retrieve your custom tune, and there isn't much you can do about it.

Even if you could encrypt your tuning, how many cars are already driving around with it? Would they all return just so you can re-flash your encrypted tuning and thus lock them out from using the new, easier OBD2 method? That sounds like a recipe for angry customers.

My advice would be embrace the future and learn the OBD2 method. DRM never works and the hackers/crackers/thieves will always beat you.

Lee Harrison
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