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.