Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades
A group of researchers said they have found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats — for free.By doing this, the researchers essentially found a way to jailbreak the car. This may also give owners the ability to enable the self-driving and navigation system in regions where it’s normally not available, the researchers told TechCrunch, though they admitted that they haven’t tested these capabilities yet, as that would require more reverse engineering.
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.
Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades | TechCrunch
A group of researchers found a way to hack a Tesla's hardware with the goal of getting free in-car upgrades, such as heated rear seats.
techcrunch.com
