Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades

L4sBot@lemmy.worldmod to Technology@lemmy.world – 1387 points – Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades | TechCrunch
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Researchers jailbreak a Tesla to get free in-car feature upgrades::A group of researchers found a way to hack a Tesla's hardware with the goal of getting free in-car upgrades, such as heated rear seats.

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"you wouldn't download an in-car feature"

I'd do it even if I didn't want the feature.

You are stealing that feature. Because of you some innocent tesla owner will have their in-car features taken away by the piracy enforcement team.

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I'm amazed that it's legal for a car company to sell you something, and then after you own it, remotely disable xyz aspects of the functionality unless you pay them more. How can that be legal? I own the car, it's MINE now, how can I not use every single thing that's in it?

Same reason it's legal for HP to brick your printer if you use third party ink. You violated their shitty TOS that none of us read because it's 80 pages of legalese, but you agreed to it.

hmmm yes I suppose that's true. Okay so let me rephrase: I'm amazed it's legal for a car manufacturer to even HAVE a TOS like that when you purchase a car. It shouldn't be legal to write language like "you are purchasing this but agreeing that you can't use it" ... wtf?

I agree that it's wrong, but I don't think, at least in the U.S., that there's any law against it. Like I said, HP does the exact same thing with their printers. I certainly would like for it to be illegal.

Can any fill in how this is in the EU right now, as they often have better legislation regarding this issue?

In Germany, BMW and VW both offer subscriptions for functionality already built into the car. BMW is notorious for their heated seat subscription here and the Mk8 Golf I leased for a while had a bunch of minor stuff pay-walled like automatic high beams, changing color of the interior ambient lighting, etc.

You can still outright buy those features but it’s totally insane to pay for something that’s already physically inside the car. And it’s not like these are budget brands that need to upsell a bunch of stuff to be profitable. A base Golf starts at €31k…

As for Tesla, at least where I am in the EU, there is only one feature offered as a subscription: a mobile network connection for the car. Keeping its SIM card active basically. That one makes sense, I'd say.

Then there are three "features" that you can buy outright after the fact: an "acceleration boost", that one is dodgy, and two levels of their auto-pilot/self-driving. The latter two currently do effectively nothing (especially in Europe that is also true for enhanced autopilot), so they are more or less an option to say "here have some money for future development" if you have too much...

No heating subscription or anything like that. I was going to say that I think the local laws seem to have at least discouraged them a bit, but BMW and VW are trying it too, so I don't know.

So I’ve been in discussions like this for equipment on trains. It functionally goes:

You paid for X. The hardware we plan to use for faster build supports X+Y. You can either:

  1. pay for Y
  2. have us artificially prevent Y
  3. wait until the hardware that just does X comes in

I actually agree with the options prevented above. I just think that, as the owner, you should still have the right to reverse item 2 if you can figure out how. Especially if it’s out of warranty.

Don't like it? Don't buy it. Simple.

“Don’t like it? Move”

That’s the same dangerous logic. Heaven forbid people try to make things better.

First they enshittified Tesla and I didn't care cuz I didn't buy Tesla

Then they enshittified GM and I didn't care cuz I didn't like GM

Then they enshittified Toyota and I didn't care cuz I didn't buy Toyota

....

Then they'd enshittified everything, and since they also cut all corporate taxes and subsidized the oil companies my town has no public transit and I walk by the side of the road.

Lets be fair

TOSs you need two lawyers and an ai chatbot to explain to you, shouldnt be legal vs regular citizens.

They cannot expect anyone to read all TOS they get thrown in their face throughout a lifetime. Let alone understand them. Its often not written super clearly and not all users can even read the language very well to begin with.

I don't disagree. I'm just saying how things are, not how they should be.

I really wonder if there's a way to use LLMs just to point out every concerning thing in a EULA/TOS

To what end? Probably every eula/tos you click through has concerning shit that is against your best interest. Either you use the product or you don't.

That’s why EULAs or other contracts are not necessarily legally binding if they contain specific parts that could be considered “unfair”; at least in the European Union.

Probably not ChatGPT because who knows what was in its EULA and we couldn't use it to summarize it before agreeing to it.

Bet you could but not sure what that would get you. So you don't click agree to it. Now what?

The captalism, American politics bought and paid for.

I mean you are correct to some extent. But I'm curious, how does this not happen in a system where the state has full control? The only difference is the consumer has no other choices and the "politics" don't have to be paid for as they are already fully in control.

Unless you mean to say that by the good graces of the government they'd never do that in a state run economy because it's morally wrong. In which case... Lol

People who say things like that don't understand what regulations are or that better regulated capitalism is probably what they want

State-run authoritarian economies generally aren't so money-obsessed that they pull weird shit like this, but generally suffer from drastic inequality, distribution inefficiency, and a general lack of freedom and innovation. The most effective economic models from what I've seen are hybrid models, with a regulated market system with some nationalized industries. Morally though, I also believe that a nation's economic system should be democratic and that people should have a say in how their workplace is run and who their workplace leadership should be.

Unless you pay them more every month. Not everything needs to be a subscription and they'll keep doing it unless people stop buying.

I've seen a bunch of lab equipment do this as well. For some, there are firmware hacks available to enable features only available on models twice the price.

It's a bit inevitable. There's a market for a range of features - i.e. some people don't want to pay extra for extra features. But it's simpler (i.e. cheaper) to produce all models with the same hardware. So, to fill the market, some features are simply disabled in software.

Imagine buying a house but you didn't want to pay extra so one room is padlocked, or several windows boarded up, or a pool walled off.

If it brought down the price of the house, people who didn't need those things would absolutely take the deal, and that's the point.

do you think it'd be right for people to break into the room

Were the terms of the purchase in the contract that the purchasers weren't allowed in the room? If so, then no. That would be breach of contract and wrong.

To be clear. I'm not a fan of paid upgrades for things that are already physically included but inaccessible without payment. But I get it because it still brings the price of the thing down to those who don't care about having the extra thing.

The point is being locked out of something you own is immoral. People being will to take the immoral deal doesn't make it okay.

So, when Tesla installed a rear seat heater module that's unusable by the car owner because they didn't pay for it, is the heater module actually legally owned by the car owner (even though it doesn't work), or is it still owned by Tesla? If the module is legally owned by the car owner, does Tesla in this case only sell ability to turn on the heater module?

Oftentimes it's done because it's cheaper, though oftentimes it's actually more expensive but they calculate that money from licenses post initial sale gets them more revenue and margin in the end anyway.

Still, even if it always was cheaper for the manufacturer this way, the point here is companies should not be able to control something you physically own once you have purchased it. It's a dangerous precedent to set and things like this will creep into more and more products if we let it.

Companies have owned your hardware for decades. Apart from a few open hardware systems like x86, everything comes software or mechanically locked to the price you pay.

good. software locks are anti human and anti consumer. everyone inherently feels ripped off by them, but the more capitalist minded think 'oh that's the company's right to do'

if it's my property in my house I can fuck with it to do whatever I want

Unfortunately because most of this is locked behind DRM you may be subject to crimes best described by someone else as "felony contempt of business model".

How dare people find ways around our artificial scarcity. /s

So you think you should be able to pay for a base model and get all the features of the top of the line model? Try that at a Toyota dealership and let me know how that goes.

Flipping a bit in software doesn't cost Tesla anything, the hardware is already installed.

It would be totally different if Tesla didn't install the hardware by default, and you had to pay to have it put in.

It doesn't cost VW anything either, they still want 1500€ to enable the fog lights to turn on when taking a turn (not sure how what feature is called).

If they put the premium shit in the car and software locked it out, fuck them. It's part of the car I paid for, I'll do whatever the fuck I want with it. Don't like it? Don't put the premium shit in a base model.

I think that if they're letting those cars go out the factory door with the parts for heated rear seats, then I own those too, and I'll do with them what I please.

and if they softlock it they should pay a price for taking up space and load that you didn't ask for.

I love that you think Tesla isn't pricing the premium features into the base model.

At Toyota, you pay for the premium shit to get installed, you most certainly do not pay a fee (recurring or otherwise) for them to turn it on.

I'm actually really glad that Toyota hasn't locked their active safety features (Adaptive Cruise Control, Lane Departure Assist, Frontal Collision Braking) behind vehicle trim paywalls. That stuff is standard on all their vehicles now.

Unlike others cough Dodge cough where is still a premium upcharge for driver assistance technology that can potentially save your life on the road. I get charging more for heated seats and whatnot, but it's unethical in this instance because the car is certainly able to (on a hardware level) turn on its active safety features without doing a complete retrofit.

Absolutely. Turning those features off is a safety risk and should probably be illegal. Imagine the world of cringe where you tried to pull on your seatbelt but it was locked because you didn't pay for your seatbelt subscription.

The future sucks.

Hardware companies trying to copy the software companies with a subscription model really sucks. What's next? Intel charging a monthly fee to unlock 5 GHz boost? Nvidia charging a monthly fee if you want to do anything AI-related with their GPUs? Samsung and LG charging a monthly fee if you want to use a TV or a monitor for more than 2 hours a day? Greed knows no bounds.

Funnily enough, Intel tried something similar already in 2010 (way before their pay-as-you-go bullshit). It was a Pentium that you could unlock hyper-threading on for $50.

That model is here already for cloud computing, literally dollars for CPU cores and bandwidth and memory. But that only works out well for renting other people's servers and would be bad for any product that you purchase outright. I suggest we all not buy those products if they do that.

I hope no execs are reading this thread because if they had these ideas they'd have no qualms about implementing them

This isn't unusual for Enterprise grade IT hardware. Mainframes have been sold/licensed that way for decades. I recently dealt with a performance issue that we solved by buying a license to use more of a piece of hardware that was already in our data center (we didn't realize the piece we owned had twice the capacity that could be unlocked just through licensing till we engaged the vendor)

Is that not what the K versions of their processors are? Pay more for the ability to overclock and get good speeds

Amd did that back in the day. All the chips were the same but locked out. You could scrape and use a pencil to draw in a jumper and make your chip the flagship one.

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of course it was the PSP. I’ll say it again and again; secure computing is like adding a back door that you know about. Fuck intel me, fuck amd psp, fuck apple sep, fuck microsoft tpm, and fuck anyone who wants to have control over a device I own.

Can somebody build & sell a dumb electric car? Or at least one not permanently internet-enabled and/or that has no functionality and capabilities locked behind software and subscriptions?

Ive been genuinely thinking about getting into business selling dumb stuff exclusively. Dumb tvs, fridges, washers, phones, printers watever. Just a safe online vendor where you know that what you buy wont connect to the internet, need a subscription, or require a credit card on file to work. I just need a business name.

That's a neat idea, and definitely a product group that I've been actively looking for. But I do find it ironic that your business model is of an online vendor that sells offline versions of online appliances haha

Was on the market for a TV for my grandparents recently. I just need a monitor, digital receiver, and remote - in one neat package. How hard can it be?

Very, apparently. Can't even find cheap Chinese crap that isn't "smart" these days.

Thrift stores are where the remaining dumb tech is currently housed... until they, too, are emptied.

Dumbly: Uncomplicated Technology for a Complicated World

The Dacia Spring fits the bill out of necessity (price). It is not fast, it has low range, uses cheap materials and it is rather small.

But I don't think it can spy on you and it's charming through its simple honesty.

Assuming you are in the part of the world where they are being sold

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Technological serfdom. You don't own anything anymore. You can perpetually rent from your lord or you can suffer the consequences.

The "you wouldnt pirate a car" crowd will be shook when they finally realize " yes we would"

I used to think " I wouldn't because that's a stupid metaphor" but now that it's not a stupid metaphor oh yes the fuck I would.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

A group of researchers said they have found a way to hack the hardware underpinning Tesla’s infotainment system, allowing them to get what normally would be paid upgrades — such as heated rear seats — for free.

This may also give owners the ability to enable the self-driving and navigation system in regions where it’s normally not available, the researchers told TechCrunch, though they admitted that they haven’t tested these capabilities yet, as that would require more reverse engineering.

“We are not the evil outsider, but we’re actually the insider, we own the car,” Werling told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the conference.

Werling explained that what they did was “fiddle around” with the supply voltage of the AMD processor that runs the infotainment system.

With the same technique, the researchers said they were also able to extract the encryption key used to authenticate the car to Tesla’s network.

I'm a bot and I'm open source!

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Heated rear seats I can get behind

Why would you want to be behind the heated seats? Seems like it’d be warmer on the seat, not to mention that there’s no 3rd row in a Tesla so you’d be in the trunk…

Researchers jailbreak Tesla to allow usage of the entire car they purchased. FTFY

This looks to have already been discovered years ago as this company sells an OBD2 plug that can toggle all of this stuff, as well as highjacking some controls to add new functionality, as well as adding 50HP to those cars with a specific rear motor version https://ingenext.ca/products/ghost-upgrade

Is this method software only? Because the upgrades on that site are pretty expensive and proprietary.

If you read the article it is different. This relies on physically bringing connections to gain root access to the file system.

It's also unlikely Tesla can't just watch for modified files and update them everytime the car goes into drive or something. They probably won't do it, but to claim it's impossible is just disingenuous

If I hear I can solder a modchip to a Tesla to get free features, bypass paid subscription stuff, I totally would.

Teslas have x64 CPU's? What the hell?

It does have the letter x in it...

/s

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This is great. When you buy the car, you own it. I don’t care what kind of weird licenses and contracts they put together. If I buy the car and there is hardware in the car that allows for heated seats, there is no reason why I shouldn’t be able to enable it myself, tear it out, or do whatever I want with it. It is mine.

I can understand there being safety concerns for modifying a car. But the owner of the car already accepts liability for the operation of that car. If I do not modify the car and I get into an accident due to Teslas auto pilot feature or another thing baked into their system, does Tesla accept liability? No, they do not. If it is my responsibility for the safe operation of the vehicle, then it is also my responsibility to modify a vehicle in a safe manner. 

Never buying any car with this type of tech.

If it's "our future" then I'll stick to used cars for life

I have on old car. I should replace it, but it doesn't have a lot of mileage. I'm honestly dreading the purchase of new car because of this practice, not just the subscription features, but the control the maker has by being networked to it. I love my old dumb car.

Just buy a used car instead, as it's actually better nowadays with the insane dealer markups

Elon's going to have a hissy fit

Can't imagine a bigger "fuck you" to give to the Muskrat... other than when Xtwitter finally implodes.

"how to jailbreak your Mr coffee grinder and grind any beans you want!"

"5 hacks to get your doorbell to keep working without a subscription!"

"How to beat Microsoft Office drm to turn in assignments for free!"

"4 clever ways to keep your AC running all summer long for free, no CC required! #3 will shock you!"

Whoa there.

Any beans?

Garbanzo beans? Lima beans? Pinto beans? Kidney beans? So any bean I can find on Wikibeania?

GOOD!! I despise it when hardware features are held at ransom!

Quick question: Couldn't Tesla's telemetry servers detect this kind of jailbreaking and, say, remotely disable the device? I'm kind of thinking of Nintendo consoles and their bans on some jailbroken consoles (typically the ones that play pirated games online).

I'm guessing they spoofed the telemetry in order to enable said features. It doesn't say in the article the method, so I could be wrong.

Why the heck would they install the equipment in the first place if it's only to block it???? Is that why the base model is so expensive? You're basically buying the deluxe version but are simply stuck using basic features because of the software???

Because it’s cheaper for them. Building all the cars the same simplifies production and inventory management. They don’t have to configure each car for the end users requirements; they just use software to turn these features on.

The question that should be asked is if they can put these features into the car and still make a profit why are these added features so expensive as all the fees are 100% profit!

Then just sell that one model and enable everything. Otherwise don't complain when hackers crack the box and enable the features.

Oh I agree with you and am not defending this practise. Was just trying to explain why it’s done.

No no I know. Don't worry. LoL. This reply wasn't directed at you. It's just what's on my mind. It feels good to vent.

It’s ridiculous how nowadays a lot of hardware car features are locked behind a simple software switch. Feels like both a massive waste of resources for people that don’t buy the upgrades, and like having to pay for a feature that is already physically present in your car. Software-only upgrades like full self driving are understandable, hardware upgrades locked behind a software gate aren’t.

[cross-posted from my reply to the same article on c/news]

How long the instructions would last if posted on Twitter?

https://youtu.be/PWQL_XORalY

#thank you

I was afraid I'd get to the bottom and not find the perfect song.

Muskovite builds vehicles with a built in micro-transaction PTW scheme? Hilarious.

A lower hanging fruit is usually present in systems like this. I wonder if they've tried glitching because thats what they were familiar with it, or if the software was not easily exploitable.

Typically low level attacks such as these is where it starts because they grant access to parts that can be used to learn more about the system as a whole.

This understanding then can be used to find easier to exploit avenues.

A good example of this is the history of exploits on Nintendo hardware.

They almost all started with finding an exploit at the hardware level, which then subsequently lead to finding software exploits and ways to leverage them in an easy way for end users.

That's interesting. In a world where everything runs webkit, I thought it would work the other way around.