A British-based computer scientist has been banned from publishing an academic paper revealing the secret codes used to start luxury cars including Porsches, Audis, Bentleys and Lamborghinis as it could lead to the theft of millions of vehicles, a judge has ruled.

The high court imposed an injunction on the University of Birmingham's Flavio Garcia, a lecturer in computer science, who has cracked the security system by discovering the unique algorithm that allows the car to verify the identity of the ignition key.

The UK injunction is an interim step in a case launched by Volkswagen's parent, which owns the four luxury marques, against Garcia and two other cryptography experts from a Dutch university.

It complained that the publication could "allow someone, especially a sophisticated criminal gang with the right tools, to break the security and steal a car". The cars are protected by a system called Megamos Crypto, an algorithm which works out the codes that are sent between the key and the car.

The scientists wanted to publish their paper at the well-respected Usenix Security Symposium in Washington DC in August, but the court has imposed an interim injunction. Volkswagen had asked the scientists to publish a redacted version of their paper – Dismantling Megamos Crypto: Wirelessly Lockpicking a Vehicle Immobiliser – without the codes, but they declined.

Volkswagen told the court that the technology they examined was used in a number of its vehicles and other mass market cars manufactured by itself and others.

Garcia and his colleagues from the Stichting Katholieke Universiteit, Baris Ege and Roel Verdult, said they were "responsible, legitimate academics doing responsible, legitimate academic work" and their aim was to improve security for everyone, not to give criminals a helping hand at hacking into high-end cars that can cost their owners £250,000.

They argued that "the public have a right to see weaknesses in security on which they rely exposed". Otherwise, the "industry and criminals know security is weak but the public do not".

They argued that "the public have a right to see weaknesses in security on which they rely exposed".

Now, call me a cynic, but you don't have to actually publish the code to prove that's the case. Plenty of security papers get published with an explanation of a vulnerability that anyone interested will understand without examples of how to abuse it in actual code. Publishing the codes themselves is pretty much unnecessary academically.

But it gets them a lot of publicity...

If this security problem can be verified via peer review shouldn't the right to free speech trump the commercial impact of a massive recall to fix the cars?

The courts have left customers vulnerable to commercial laziness.

My concern is that the cars will not have their security fixed and eventually they pay the cost through higher insurance or non payment because this was a known weakness that was not fixed. The fact that there is a hole in the security of these cars is enough to motivate criminals to find that hole. So the customers will be vulnerable and their insurance will be impacted all to save the company face.