CryptoKey — Ending vehicle theft at the protocol level (Proposal)

“The relay attack, OBD programming, and the chop-shop parts market are not three separate problems. They share one root cause: no cryptographic identity. CryptoKey gives identity to the vehicle, the key, and every component.” Three attack techniques now account for the economic majority of automotive theft in the UK. All three are cheap, scalable, and unaddressed at an architectural level. Existing countermeasures — signal pouches, steering locks, trackers, VIN stamping — are deterrents or recovery tools. None address the architectural root cause: modern vehicles extend implicit trust to RF proximity, to the OBD-II interface, and to any physically identical component. CryptoKey is a physically-anchored, cryptographically-enforced vehicle access and component identity system. It eliminates all three attack vectors through three core design decisions: