Cycling is a phenomenal sport that pits the very best athletes against one another in some of the toughest races you can imagine. Predictably, it also has a pretty dark past that’s seen it tackle drug cheating scandals, allegations of motor-doping from some riders and now experts have warned that there may be a new way to cheat your way to a race win: hacking your rival’s fancy electronic gears.
Bike tech has come a long way in the last few decades. Carbon fiber rules the roost when it comes to bike frames, tubeless tires are the popular choice to prevent your race being ruined by a puncture and electric gear shifters have replaced cable-actuated gearing on many flagship bikes.
Instead of shifting a bike’s derailleur by pulling or loosening a cable, these fancy electric shifters use a battery-powered derailleurs that is connected by bluetooth or radio to shifters in the bike’s cockpit. Big-name component brands like Sram, Campagnolo and Shimano all make electric shifters these days, and they’re an absolute joy to ride. But now, a team of experts has warned that Shimano’s system, called Di2 is susceptible to hacking.
Researchers from UC San Diego and Northeastern University uncovered a vulnerability in the Di2 system that allows hackers to gain control of the shifters and change gears on riders’ bikes without their control, reports Wired. The weakness could allow rivals to shift their competitors to an easier gear than they need or a much harder one to slow them down on tough ascents:
The trick would, the researchers say, easily be enough to hamper a rival on a climb or, if timed to certain intense moments of a race, even cause dangerous instability. “The capability is full control of the gears. Imagine you’re going uphill on a Tour de France stage: If someone shifts your bike from an easy gear to a hard one, you’re going to lose time,” says Earlence Fernandes, an assistant professor at UCSD’s Computer Science and Engineering department. “Or if someone is sprinting in the big chain ring and you move it to the small one, you can totally crash a person’s bike like that.”
If you wanted to derail a rival’s bike race, hackers use a similar relay technique similar to the weakness found in some keyless entry systems found in modern cars. Using a few hundred dollars-worth of equipment, hackers intercept the target bike’s gear shifting signals. They can then replay the signals as and when they require, shifting the Di2 derailleur up and down as they please.
All that’s needed for an attack like this, Wired reports, is a software-defined radio, an antenna and a laptop. Researchers even warned that this tech could be shrunk down and hidden inside one of the support vehicles that follows the professional peloton on any cycling race.
Thankfully, the research wasn’t carried out for evil, and instead the team is now working with Shimano to try and issue a software patch that could prevent its 105 and Dura-Ace groupsets from being susceptible to the attacks, reports CyclingNews:
“Shimano has been working with the researchers to enhance our Di2 wireless communication security for all riders,” began the brand’s official statement on the matter.
“Through this collaboration, Shimano engineers identified and created a new firmware update to enhance the security of the Di2 wireless communication systems.”
Shimano also adds that the updates have been made available to pro teams and that a consumer-facing firmware patch will follow.
So if you do want to prank your buddies with their fancy bikes, you’ve probably got a few days left to try and figure out this hack for yourself, as the software patch is yet to roll out to normal consumers. However, Shimano says it has already issued the fix to riders currently competing in the Tour de France Femmes, which is winding its way through France as we speak.
While I’m sure many of you will argue that this is an issue that would never have existed if we’d just stuck with cable-actuated gears, the advantages of electronic shifting can’t be understated. As we found when riding BMW’s e-bike, the system from Sram offers buttery-smooth shifting that’s reliable again, and again, and again.