Keen Security Lab senior researchers Sen Nie, Ling Liu, and Wen Lu, along with director Samuel Lv, demonstrated the hacks against a Tesla Model S P85 and 75D and say their efforts will work on multiple Tesla models.
The Shanghai, China-based hacking firm has withheld details of the world-first zero day attacks and privately disclosed the flaws to Tesla.
The firm worked on the attack for several months, eventually gaining access to the motor that moves the driver's seat, turning on indicators, opening the car's sunroof and activating window wipers.
The Chinese should not make Iron Man angry...
According to Ars Technica :
Tesla has already issued an over-the-air firmware patch to fix the situation.
Previous hacks of Tesla vehicles have required physical access to the car. The Keen attack exploited a bug in Tesla's Web browser, which required the vehicle to be connected to a malicious Wi-Fi hotspot. This allowed the attackers to stage a "man-in-the-middle" attack, according to researchers. In a statement on the vulnerability, a Tesla spokesman said, "our realistic estimate is that the risk to our customers was very low, but this did not stop us from responding quickly." After Keen brought the vulnerability to Bugcrowd, the company managing Tesla's bug bounty program, it took just 10 days for Tesla to generate a fix.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 22 2016, @03:59AM
For example, the module that applies the updates could be separate from the stuff that downloads it.
And the module can check the submitted updates (digital signatures) and refuse to do the entire update transaction if any submitted updates aren't valid.
The updating module does very few things and if it's been tested enough you may even choose to not have it updatable at all (have to physically replace stuff if there's a problem, e.g. you need to update the digital certificates because someone in HQ got pwned).