After WIRED journalist Andy Greenberg's jeep was stunt-hacked and driven into a ditch by remote car hackers Charlie Miller and Chris Valasek last week, Chrysler recalled 1.4 million vehicles for a software fix. But they aren't the only ones with extreme vulnerabilities. "Currently 95 percent of major European car brands -- Mercedes, Audi, BMW, Jaguar, Bentley, Renault, Toyota, Lexus -- use keyless entry, which means the car automatically unlocks and starts when you're nearby," says Boris Danev, Swiss computer scientist and car hacker. "What we discovered in our research is that all these cars use the same technology -- and it can be hacked surprisingly easily, using just one device." While a PhD student at Zurich's ETH University, Danev, supervised by security professor Srdjan Capkun, hacked into about ten car models of these major car manufacturers, and was able to open and drive them all. "In Zollikon, a rich neighbourhood of Zurich, we asked a car owner to leave his car key where he usually leaves it -- on his kitchen table," Danev says. "Using our device which intercepted and amplified the signal, the key could answer back to the car from inside the home, the car opened, and my colleague drove away."

So Danev decided to build a secure solution. Spun out from ETH in June 2012, he founded 3DB Technologies -- a startup that has created a proprietary smart chip for car keys. "Our chip is a piece of silicon, it's roughly 5 by 5mm and can fit inside a key easily, very low power. The main feature is that it can do a secure 'roundtrip' distance measurement," says Danev.

Here's how it works: when you try your car door, it sends a signal to the key chip and starts a stopwatch. The key sends back a response to the car, so the car can calculate the physical distance between itself and the key. "The manufacturer can set the threshold at two, three metres, whatever you want. We make the distance measurement using speed of light, so the car will know very precisely how far it is from the key."

Danev is now discussing the integration of the chip into keys made by a range of car manufacturers such as Audi and BMW; he hopes it will be on shelves by 2018. "These companies believe our technology has the potential to solve this security hole completely, so we are building commercial partnerships," Danev says. "We already have our proof of technology, so we know it works."

This article was originally published by WIRED UK