Researchers at the Technical University (TU) Berlin recently discovered a chip flaw within the AMD-powered system of Tesla electric vehicles (EVs). Exploiting the flaw reportedly gave the researchers access to feature that were hidden behind the brand’s software paywall.
The researchers said that they had found a weakness within Tesla’s 3rd generation Media Control Unit, also known as MCU-Z, which in turn is powered by a custom AMD Ryzen chipset. “The chip flaw gives us two distinct capabilities: First, it enables the first unpatchable AMD-based ‘Tesla Jailbreak’, allowing us to run arbitrary software on the infotainment. Second, it will enable us to extract an otherwise vehicle-unique hardware-bound RSA key used to authenticate and authorize a car in Tesla’s internal service network.”
The method in which the researchers used to exploit the AMD chip flaw is known as a voltage fault injection attack. What is even more exciting is that executing the bypass didn’t require any expensive gadgets or hardware – off-the-shelf, cheap hardware was all it took for them to pull off the jailbreak.
The amount of software features the researchers managed to unlocked using the AMD chip flaw isn’t cheap either. All in all, the heated seats, acceleration boost, and the full self-driving package that is offered with the Tesla Model Y – the car that the researchers used to pull off their exploits – costs up to US$15,000 (~RM68,385). And because this flaw is technically unpatchable, it is highly possible may have to conduct a recall on all current Tesla vehicles running on a 3rd generation MCU-Z, seeing as how a software update isn’t going to do anything to alleviate the issue.
(Source: Hot Hardware, Elektrek)
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