"Tesla Jailbreak Unlocks Theft of In-Car Paid Features"

Tesla cars are vulnerable to a nearly irreversible jailbreak of their onboard infotainment systems, which would enable owners to gain access to a variety of paid in-car features for free. According to a team of researchers, the stolen benefits can range from better bandwidth to faster acceleration and heated seats. The researchers also discovered that it is possible to escape the infotainment system and switch to the internal Tesla network for authenticating cars, which opens the door to more advanced modding, including breaking geolocation restrictions on navigation and self-driving and the ability to transfer the Tesla's "user profile" to another vehicle. Teslas have been at the forefront of enabling "smart" features, notably autonomous driving, for quite some time. All recent Tesla models feature an AMD-based infotainment system called MCU-Z, allowing an innovative in-car purchase scheme for advanced features enabled over-the-air (OTA) upon purchase. This was the target of a group of doctoral students in the Technical University of Berlin graduate program and independent researcher Oleg Drokin. This article continues to discuss the researchers' demonstrated jailbreaking of Tesla cars.

Dark Reading reports "Tesla Jailbreak Unlocks Theft of In-Car Paid Features"