Students bypass advanced protection of Tesla cars

Three information security researchers from the Technical University of Berlin forced Tesla's driver assistant to turn on the "Elon mode" and thus gained access to the company's secrets. All Tesla models are believed to be vulnerable to this attack.

Using tools that cost about 600 euros, TU Berlin students Christian Werling, Niclas Kühnapfel and Hans-Niklas Jacob caused a short two-second voltage drop of 560 millivolts and thus "rooted" the ARM64 circuit of Tesla's autopilot.

The power outage allowed researchers to extract arbitrary code and user data from the system, including cryptographic keys and important parts of the system, allowing them to reconstruct how the system worked. The researchers even gained access to a video with GPS coordinates that the previous owner of the vehicle had deleted.

German researchers have managed to determine which data Tesla collects to train its artificial intelligence and which it ignores.

"Elon's way" is a secret feature of fully self-driving hands-free driving that hackers managed to discover earlier. This executive mode allows Tesla vehicles to drive themselves without any driver intervention or control. The mode was discovered in June 2023 by @greentheonly, who tested it and posted some footage on social media.

This type of bypass could also enable free premium features. Tesla's "Full Self-Driving" (FSD) capability is available as an optional extra for $12,000. However, it requires active driver control and does not allow the car to actually drive autonomously. The FSD system has been repeatedly criticized for its incorrect decisions.

With their work, the researchers wanted to explain Tesla's security architecture and loopholes in the Autopilot system. All Tesla vehicles are believed to be vulnerable to this type of attack, as they all likely use the same circuitry, even if the owner has not purchased the driver assistance system. The researchers themselves were surprised at how easily they got hold of Tesla's secrets.