Backbytes: VW covering things up? It wouldn't be the first time...

VW didn't want anyone to know how easy their cars are to steal

When Volkswagen was fingered for building its cars with software that could tell when they were being emissions tested and react accordingly, it wasn't the first time that Europe's biggest car maker had been found out.

In recent years, VW - along with a number of other car manufacturers - have been battling security researchers who have tried, in vain, to warn of security shortcomings in their wireless central locking systems.

Weaknesses in the radio-frequency identification (RFID) transponder chips used in immobilisers were discovered in 2012 - but car companies ganged up to sue any researchers who dared pipe up and warn drivers.

Only this summer were the researchers - Roel Verdult and Baris Ege from Radboud University in the Netherlands, and Flavio Garcia from the University of Birmingham, England (not Alabama) - able to present their findings at a security conference, the USENIX event in Washington DC.

The weaknesses concern the Megamos Crypto transponder, which is used in a number of high-end cars, such as Maseratis, Ferraris and Porsches, as well as pretty much every VW going.

Tim Watson, diector of cyber security at the University of Warwick, suggested that one of the reasons for car makers' reluctance to even countenance the results of the research being published was because it would cost them a small fortune to fix the problem.

In any case, if a customer's car gets stolen, they'll have to buy another one, paid for by their insurance company - which was no doubt regarded as a "win-win solution" in car makers' boardrooms.

Of course, the car makers wouldn't have been able to silence the academics without the help of m'learned friends at the High Court in London, who generously granted the companies an injunction preventing the researchers from presenting their paper at the same conference two years ago.

Brushing the security flaws under the carpet, meanwhile, didn't stop thousands of cars from being spirited away from their owners' driveways - thanks to the security flaw, it can take just 60 seconds for a car thief to get away with someone's top-of-the-range BMW, Range Rover or boring, old VW.