Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades - Beritaja

A group of researchers said they person recovered a measurement to hack The hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what usually would beryllium paid upgrades — specified arsenic heated rear seats — for free.

By doing this, The researchers fundamentally recovered a measurement to jailbreak The car. This whitethorn besides springiness owners The expertise to alteration The self-driving and navigation strategy in regions wherever it’s usually not available, The researchers told TechCrunch, though they admitted that they haven’t tested these capabilities yet, arsenic that would require much reverse engineering.

The researchers will coming their investigation adjacent week astatine The Black Hat cybersecurity convention in Las Vegas.

Christian Werling, 1 of The 3 students astatine Technische Universität Berlin who conducted The investigation on pinch different independent researcher, said that their onslaught requires beingness entree to The car, but that’s precisely The script wherever their jailbreak would beryllium useful.

“We are not The evil outsider, but we’re really The insider, we ain The car,” Werling told TechCrunch in an question and reply up of The conference. “And we don’t want to salary these $300 bucks for The rear heated seats.”

The method they utilized to jailbreak The Tesla is called voltage glitching. Werling explained that what they did was “fiddle around” pinch The proviso voltage of The AMD processor that runs The infotainment system.

“If we do it astatine The correct moment, we Can instrumentality The CPU into doing thing else. It has a hiccup, skips an instruction, and accepts our manipulated code. That’s fundamentally what we do in a nutshell,” he said.

With The aforesaid technique, The researchers said they were besides capable to extract The encryption cardinal utilized to authenticate The car to Tesla’s network. In theory, this would unfastened The doorway for a bid of different attacks, but The researchers said they still person to research The possibilities in this scenario.

The researchers said they were besides capable to extract individual accusation from The car specified arsenic contacts, caller almanac appointments, telephone logs, locations The car visited, and Wi-Fi passwords, convention tokens from email accounts, among others. This is information that could beryllium charismatic to group who don’t ain that peculiar car, but still person beingness entree to it.

Mitigating The hardware based onslaught that The researchers achieved is not simple. In fact, The researchers said, Tesla would person to switch The hardware in question.

Tesla did not respond to a petition for comment.