Security CPE

Control Shopping Cart Wheels With Your Phone!

DEF CON 29 - Joseph Gabay - DoS Denial of Shopping Analyzing and Exploiting Physical Shopping Cart

Many supermarkets and shopping centers have implemented devices that “lock” their shopping carts if they’re taken outside of an approved boundary (e.g, a parking lot). This talk examines some of the technology that’s used to do this, as well as ways to capture and spoof the control signals to defeat these devices.

We will go over the anatomy of remotely lockable shopping cart wheels, their basic theory, and get into how they’re controlled. We’ll deconstruct some samples of the lock and unlock signals captured using a homemade antenna and a HackRF, and briefly discuss methods of rebroadcasting them – as well as the challenges inherent to this process.