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37C3 - Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains

media.ccc.de · 524K views · 2023-12-29 · 1:01:46

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Overview

A 37C3 talk on how a series of Polish electric trains stopped working after servicing by an independent company. The speakers explain how train control systems work and how they reverse-engineered the software lockouts.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the key account of train DRM being broken, in threads on right to repair, reverse engineering and vendor lockouts.

Discussed on HN; no positive recommendation is recorded in this export · HN mentions 2024–2025

Topics

Security & hackingRepair, teardowns & right to repair
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reverse engineeringright to repairnewagdragon sector37c3

What people said

lesuorac · 2025-11 · Reference

I'm not sure this comment does justice to the situation. Poland put out a separate bid for manufacturing and servicing of their locomotives and one company won the manufacturing bid while another won the servicing bid. The servicing company was unable to get the trains into working order and after hiring hackers accused the manufactoring company of bricking the software on purpose by including geo-fences where the trains would no longer work after arriving at the servicing company's property. Perhaps the interesting part to me was Dragon Sector's (the hackers) claims that the software needs to be blessed so although they discovered problems they never changed anything because they don't have the authority to bless it and heavily imply that the fact that the manufactoring company is changing the software at will is illegal. The changes by the manufactoring company had an (undisclosed) activation sequence added to it so you didn't need to modify the software in order to get the train working so the servicing company never actually modified the software. [VIDEO] [LINK]

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archy_ · 2025-01 · Reference

The whole train DRM saga has been endlessly entertaining as someone looking in from afar, but I can only imagine the stress this must place on operators trying to keep trains maintained with this dagger dangling over their heads. I wish I could hack a train, thats a once in a lifetime opportunity and would make for an incredible "2 truth and a lie" type story Also available at [LINK] Previous coverage: "37C3 - Breaking "DRM" in Polish trains" [VIDEO] "O trzech takich, co zhakowali prawdziwy pociąg – a nawet 30 pociągów" [LINK] Mastodon post by q3k [LINK]

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golebiewsky · 2024-07 · Reference

Oh, I know something about this. Some people that made this are part of DragonSector [1] polish hacking group that broke DRMs in trains quite recently [2]. Sadly I joined company after there were long gone. Really surprised seeing this posted here as it was pointed out, the repo is pretty old and archived. [1]: [LINK] [2]: [VIDEO]

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Sources

Video by media.ccc.de, played through YouTube.

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HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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