A growing number of manufacturers are locking perfectly good hardware behind arbitrary software restrictions. While this ought to be a bigger controversy, people seem to keep paying for things like printers with ink subscriptions, cameras with features disabled in firmware, or routers with speed restrictions, ensuring that this practice continues. Perhaps the most blatant is car manufacturers that lock features such as heated seats or even performance upgrades in the hopes of securing a higher price for their vehicles. This might be a thing of the past for Teslas, whose software has been recently unlocked by Berlin IT researchers.
Researchers from Technische Universität Berlin were able to unlock Tesla’s driving assistant by inducing a two-microsecond voltage drop on the processor which allowed root access to the Autopilot software. Referring to this as “Elon mode” since it drops the requirement for the driver to keep their hands on the steering wheel, they were able to access the full self-driving mode allowing autonomous driving without driver input. Although this might be a bad idea based on the performance of “full self-driving” in the real world, the hack at least demonstrates a functional attack point and similar methods could provide free access to other premium features.
While the attack requires physical access to the vehicle’s computer and a well-equipped workbench, in the short term this method might allow for owners of vehicles to use hardware they own however they would like, and in the long term perhaps may make strides towards convincing manufacturers that “features as a service” isn’t a profitable strategy. Perhaps that’s optimistic, but at least for Teslas it’s been shown that they’re not exactly the most secured system on four wheels.
telsa?
Dyslexia is a hell of a drug
Optimism reins, I used to be dyslexic but now I’m KO
You misspelled durg
+1
My dyslexia didn’t even notice this till I saw your comment.
It’s the first thing I saw before I even opened the article.
Me too…
Hah!
Well, if they wrote Tesla, Elon will ban all sales in Germany🤣
A city in Okraholma
“While this ought to be a bigger controversy, people seem to keep paying for things like printers with ink subscriptions, cameras with features disabled …”
I would like to argue against your opinion.
Please, please! More printers with ink subscriptions, locked down phones and cameras with features disabled!
For as long as we can hack it, we can hack them into get cheap printers without subscriptions, hugely powerful phones without restrictions, full-featured cameras for the price of a cheap one, and oscilloscopes with twice the sample rate for the price of their cheaper brother.
We should not cry too hard about these things. Because we might change the minds of manufacturers and loose this ability to easily hack devices into having better value for money (at the price of losing the manufacturer’s support of course :)).
Wish I’d proofread my comments better before posting, or that Hackaday had the option to edit my comments after I posted the mistakes…
That only works when they actually are cheap, Tesla definitively are not that, being just about the most expensive way to get a comparable EV…
The scopes and many other complex high speed electronics it just make sense for everyone to have the same hardware in the low spec model as the higher spec – it didn’t pass validation, or didn’t go through validation for the higher end features so lock down the essentially same device to produce the lower spec machine – you have just saved production costs and if it don’t function properly when ‘hacked’ into using the higher specs it isn’t the companies problem, so you have saved warranty costs too – which makes that lower spec machine able to sold cheaper profitably. While the high spec is still going to be bought by everyone that actually needs it work correctly as their day job in the range beyond the low spec model.
But for something like heated seats that are fitted anyway…
There are two (significant) reasons I do not agree with this argument:
1) “For as long as WE can hack it…” I don’t want the other 99.5% of the people to be screwed (aka “paying more than they ‘should’ be”) just so *I* can get some marginal benefit. And of course, at some point, since the population “seems to be ok with this scheme”, then when the manufacturers figure out a way to either prevent hacking or prevent these products from falling into the hands of the hacker terrorists, then we wind up screwed with everyone else. :-)
2) I don’t want to have to HACK half the stuff I buy to try to get around some restrictions that should not be there in the first place. I would rather the manufacturers do the “right thing” in the first place. And I REALLY don’t want to spend my time having to hack half of my parents’ stuff, and my family’s stuff and my neighbors’ stuff to get them to “work right”. In the big picture, this is “inefficiency” and it will lead to an over decrease in productivity/quality of life.
When existing manufacturers build products that the consumers (aka “us”) have some issues with, I’d rather see new/different manufacturers come along and eat their lunch. That’s capitalism and it’s beautiful to watch happen. :-)
There’s also
3) “for as long as we can hack it” is really, really limited.
It might seem that “everything” gets hacked but it really, really doesn’t. A lot of the more heavily locked down things (phones especially!) are functionally unhackable because there’s just not enough information available and in some cases the devices essentially blow themselves up, and you’d need multiple of the things in order to experiment on them.
“two-second voltage drop” really?
I’ve checked the presentation, it’s two microseconds.
Thanks, will fix.
I’m surprised I never saw that trick used in scifi shows/movies.
Nice but can it play doom?
You can probably run the autopilot on a 555.
autopilot or collision target recognition? I’ve heard the dual 555 can do both Jan and when it’s done, it can knock out a few bars of the sailor’s hornpipe on a piezo speaker.
Yes, but you only get one life…
First thing on the main screen when you install this hack is
DO YOU WANT UNLIMITED LIVES [Y/N]:
while the radio plays cracktro music
Aaah, yes, Telsa, the company of Melon Husk :D
+1 XD
That’s how I will refer to him from now on!
If you don’t want to be in an arms race with the people who sold you your device, where every advance they make means something stops working and you may or may not ever get it back, and most advances *you* make come at a huge cost in convenience or functionality… then don’t buy a device from people with that business model.
And if you want to discourage that business model, then ESPECIALLY don’t buy from people using it.
“If you don’t want to be in an arms race with the people who sold you your device”
Welcome to the world of Amazon FireTV sticks.
“Referring to this as “Elon mode” since it drops the requirement for the driver to keep their hands on the steering wheel, they were able to access the full self-driving mode allowing autonomous driving without driver input. ”
Governments, and people who don’t understand that autopilot doesn’t mean, no pilot.
But what does “full self driving” mean?
Even Tesla doesn’t seem to know…
Coming at this from a purely practical viewpoint, what’s going to stop your insurance company from denying any responsibility if they find you’ve hacked your car’s software? I don’t care if it’s just to get heated seats, I could see plenty of insurance companies using the rationale that “this individual modified the incredibly complex software of a modern automobile” with enough large scary legal words to effectively deny claims that aren’t litigated to death.
Many decades of previous case law? People have been modifying their vehicles ever since there have been vehicles to modify. The liability limits have been well and thoroughly tested by this point. “On a computer” doesn’t change this. If you modify your brakes, and have a collision because your brakes don’t work, you’re going to be in trouble. But if you add heated seats and have a collision because your brakes don’t work, that’s not on you.
problem is we’re well past brake-by-wire being new and untested, how do you prove that your hack had no effect on them? The whole car is interconnected…
My Model 3 front windows (both) kept going down by themselves and would go fully up when opening the door so it would hit the car’s frame. Was driving me mad. The reason? Turns out my driver side puddle lamp got disconnected…
Get free heated seats, lose supercharging and warranty. Brilliant.
Nothing new. My first Panasonic VHS recorder could use the remote for the next model up to give jog-shuttle per-frame video review. While working for a UK bank, I watched an IBM mainframe engineer do a CPU upgrade. No parts were swapped or added. When challenged, he admitted he’d just taken NOOP instructions out.
That’s hilarious