Advisories

Tesla Telematics Control Unit (TCU) < v2025.14 Authentication Bypass

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severity
high
date
Affecting
  • TCU firmware < v2025.14

CWE
  • CWE-73 External Control of File-Name or Path
  • CWE-269 Improper Privilege Management
CVSS
8.6
CVSS V4 Vector
CVSS:4.0/AV:P/AC:L/AT:N/PR:N/UI:N/VC:H/VI:H/VA:H/SC:H/SI:H/SA:H
Credit
Alex Plaskett and McCaulay Hudson of NCC Group
Description
- Tesla Telematics Control Unit (TCU) firmware prior to v2025.14 contains an authentication bypass vulnerability. The TCU runs the Android Debug Bridge (adbd) as root and, despite a "lockdown" check that disables adb shell, still permits adb push/pull and adb forward. Because adbd is privileged and the device’s USB port is exposed externally, an attacker with physical access can write an arbitrary file to a writable location and then overwrite the kernel's uevent_helper or /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug entries via ADB, causing the script to be executed with root privileges.