“We are not the evil outsider, but we’re actually the insider, we own the car,” Christian Werling, one of the researchers, told TechCrunch. “And we don’t want to pay these $300 for the rear heated seats.” He also took the time to explain, in layman’s terms, exactly how they do it.
The hack involves changing the voltage at the AMD processing unit of the infotainment system, tricking the CPU into accepting manipulated code, which grants access to the features. “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.
Once the researchers have access they can make lasting changes to the system like enabling heated seats, improving performance, or unlocking full self-driving. Currently, these are features that the average customer can only get if they’re willing to fork out cash despite the fact that the car they own is already equipped to use them.
According to the researchers, this particular type of hack isn’t patchable unless Tesla upgrades the processor in the infotainment system. That means that it should work for every model already made for the foreseeable future. In fact, if these sorts of hacks become commonplace they could take a bite out of long-term subscription models.
The researchers will present their research next week at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas.