The researchers will present their research next week at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.
Christian Werling, one of the three students at Technische Universität Berlin who conducted the research along with another independent researcher, said that their attack requires physical access to the car, but that’s exactly the scenario where their jailbreak would be useful.
“We are not the evil outsider, but we’re actually the insider, we own the car,” Werling told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the conference. “And we don’t want to pay these $300 for the rear heated seats.”
The technique they used to jailbreak the Tesla is called voltage glitching. Werling explained that what they did was “fiddle around” with the supply voltage of the AMD processor that runs the infotainment system.
“If we do it at the right moment, we can trick the CPU into doing something else. It has a hiccup, skips an instruction and accepts our manipulated code. That’s basically what we do in a nutshell,” he said.
With the same technique, the researchers said they were also able to extract the encryption key used to authenticate the car to Tesla’s network. In theory, this would open the door for a series of other attacks, but the researchers said they still have to explore the possibilities in this scenario.
The researchers said they were also able to extract personal information from the car such as contacts, recent calendar appointments, call logs, locations the car visited, Wi-Fi passwords and session tokens from email accounts, among others. This is data that could be attractive to people who don’t own that particular car, but still have physical access to it.
Mitigating the hardware-based attack that the researchers achieved is not simple. In fact, the researchers said, Tesla would have to replace the hardware in question.
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
I wish people would apply this logic to Apple aswell but they generally seem to let it slide because they like the company
I use a macbook, what functions are looked behind a paywall? Curious what am I missing.
I'm not sure about macs but on iPhones several components are coded to that specific device so it limits functions if you take it get repaired anywhere else but at Apple.
Ah, forgot about it - don't have an iPhone. But that is also really shitty, but a bit different. Apple has for sure some shitty practices - there is no arguing around it.
The main point is that since it's your device you should be allowed to do what ever you like with it including repair it yourself. In that case it feels a bit like you're renting it because every time something goes wrong you need to take it back to Apple.
No arguing from my side. Now that you say it - I need to replace a battery on an older macbook and don't do it, because it's expensive and I'm too lazy to do it my self, since it's unnecessary complicated.
With Apple, people generally let it slide because electronics aren’t as expensive and don’t last as long. Cars, on the other hand, are extraordinarily expensive and they’re supposed to last a lot longer than a phone.
Plus, at least Apple doesn’t (for example) charge you extra just to ‘unlock’ more performance on your phone.