A new Tesla hardware exploit can make paid features free, including the expensive Full Self-Driving technology. This was revealed by some security researchers, claiming that their technique can unlock paid upgrades for free.
New Tesla Hardware Exploit Could Unlock Paid Features
According to Engadget's latest report, some security researchers were able to find a way how to get free access to paid Tesla features.
Specifically, they found a hardware exploit in Tesla's infotainment system. They used a method called voltage glitching.
This technique involves tinkering with the processor's voltage supply in the infotainment system.
"If we do it at the right moment, we can trick the CPU into doing something else," explained Christian Werling a Technische Universitat Berlin student involved in the research.
"It has a hiccup, skips an instruction, and accepts our manipulated code. That's basically what we do in a nutshell," he added via Tech Crunch.
With their hardware exploit, they unlocked some paid features in a Tesla EV. These include the $15,000 Full Self-Driving (FSD) package, as well as acceleration boost, and heated seats.
Is the Tesla Hardware Exploit Legal?
Aside from unlocking paid features, the new hardware exploits that the involved security experts discovered also enabled them to acquire sensitive details.
These include contacts, call logs, car locations, calendar appointments, WiFi passwords, as well as email account session tokens.
For some people, what the researchers did is quite alarming. But, you need to remember that these experts are from the Technische Universitat Berlin.
Werling said that they are not the evil outsider, but they're definitely "the insider."
Since they are also interested to help the EV maker solve this problem, Werling and his colleagues suggested that the issue can be fixed by replacing the infotainment's hardware.
As of writing, the giant EV maker hasn't made any comment regarding the new jailbreak method.
They said that they will present their discovery at the Black Hat cybersecurity event called "Jailbreaking an Electric Vehicle in 2023 or What It Means to Hotwire Tesla's x86-Based Seat Heater."
If you want to learn more about this latest Tesla hardware exploit, you can click this link.
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