Unpatchable AMD Chip Flaw Unlocks Paid Tesla Feature Upgrades
Unpatchable AMD Chip Flaw Unlocks Paid Tesla Feature Upgrades
Sorry Elon, but this jailbreak appears to be unpatchable.
You still have to buy a Tesla. You're acting like it's a win to control the software that is on the hardware that you own. It's sad that it is.
Locked down software is shit don't get me wrong, but being able to jailbreak it feels so good.
It's worth noting our regular cars have locked down ECU. I had to pay good money to be able to get around it. But I agree it's not great overall and isn't headed in a promising direction.
Even my 2005 Audi A6 had software locked features.
Some were probably tuned for different markets, like lock confirmation beep, but others were added as later model year updates like visualization of parking sensors which, IIRC, was added with the 2006 model year update.
Now, granted, the Audi dealer that had serviced my car prior to my ownership never bothered to install firmware updates, but even when I did it was off by default.
To update I needed to flash new firmware onto the ECU’s using 3 CD’s with various updates while the car was hooked up to a charger. The whole thing took about 3 hours.
And then I could use a third party diagnostic tool (VCDS) to set and enable the visualization of the parking sensors. Honestly can’t remember if it actually worked, but at least I got other features made available due to the software updates.
The problem, IMO, is the trend towards never owning anything - not software gated features.
And that trend is certainly negative.
You would need to be crazy to apply a voltage regulation hack to the CPU that they don't sell spare parts if something goes wrong. Risking bricking a $50000 car to unlock the $300 heated seats?
And while the root access is unpatchable, because the car is always connected to internet and always sharing too much telemetry to their servers, it would be trivial for them to add an additional server side check to see if some feature has been unlocked without paying.
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Is the MCU no longer replaceable? Definitely was possible to replace them when they were shipping with weak eMMC that degraded and bricked the car (plenty of people also soldered better chips).
It's still not cheap, but there are crashed Teslas aplenty, could pull it off one if you can't pay retail.
This mod is something that people will more likely do when the car has depreciated anyway.
It feels like you could expose yourself to a bunch of liability, too. If you fuck with safety critical features and anything goes wrong?
AFAIK that's never been borne out by a trial.
The driver is always responsible for the car regardless so in reality I don't see it being an important point. Yes if something fails and it causes an accident you are on the hook if you had modified that system or failed to maintain it properly. The onus would always be on the driver to prove the manufacturer was negligent if they believe the car was not manufactured properly or designed safely.
So I wouldn't mess around with self driving (personally I'd never even use it from the factory) but there's little risk in touching many other things, these systems are designed to compartmentalize and fail safe even when you tinker with them. Though maybe not in Teslas case because they mistake the tribal knowledge of over 100years of automotive design and manufacturing for inefficiency. but I do not know a whole lot about Tesla computer systems, in ICE cars I mostly only touch the engine controls, and maybe traction control. In my current car I suppose you could do some real fucky things with electric power steering and brake by wire.
Most tuners won't go beyond messing with throttle curves and traction control when it comes to anything safety related, as neither would cause any kind of serious failure unless you tried to re write the code to do something it wasn't meant to to begin with.
I think the key issue is that the exploit can only be fixed by replacing the hardware in these cars, which means for Tesla that the vehicle’s unique IDs are probably the most valuable thing that could be taken advantage of.
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I wonder if someone could jailbreak the Tesla to make it fly? That would be something.
I downloaded a cupholder for my pentium II off the internet once.
Found someone probably around the same age as me lol.
You know, if it made the cup actually held, it was totally worth it.
Obligatory --Jailbreak The Tesla
So many people are going to brick their teslas