aka, how to spend millions of dollars collectively reinventing the screwdriver Evolution of car tuning

1. Manufacturer “We must lock the ECU! Otherwise people might improve performance! Install secure boot, encrypt firmware, disable OBD write, and weld the hood shut if we have to!”

2. Tuning Company: “Challenge accepted. We’ll reverse-engineer your bootloader, dump your flash, and make a tool that writes new maps via the same routine you tried to hide.”

3. Manufacturer (again): “Those rascals broke in! Okay, new plan, enable anti-tuning counters, virtual keys, rolling codes, and a checksum no mortal can recalc.”

4. Tuning Company: “Cute. We’ll just build a checksum calculator and sell it with our new dongle, now wrapped in our own encryption, subscription, and monthly protocol updates.”

5. Independent Hackers: “So your tuner tool costs €3,000? Let’s patch its firmware and make it free. Oh wait you encrypted it? Challenge accepted.”

6. The Meta-Hackers: “Behold! We hacked the hacker’s hack of the tuner’s hacked tool that hacks the manufacturer’s locked ECU. We call it OpenKESS++ Ultimate Reborn Edition.”

7.Manufacturer, sweating bullets: “Okay fine now we’ll add hardware TPM chips, rolling seeds, anti-downgrade counters, encrypted gateway modules, and signed OTA updates!”

8. Tuners 2.0: “Cool. We’ll bypass your gateway by flashing the gateway itself through a backdoor debug port you forgot existed.”

9. Hackers 3.0: “We’ll hack the tuners’ cloud licensing server so every tool thinks it’s authorized for every protocol forever.”

10. Meta-Mega-Hyper Hacker: “Forget tools. We hacked the supply chain that ships the tuner hardware, reflashed the flashers, and now the flashers flasher flashes flash themselves!”