 One of the unfortunate new normals in our DRM filled cyberpunk dystopia is subscription based features for your car. Like imagine explaining to a guy who drove a Model T Ford or even a guy that drove a car built in the 80s that in the future, you'll have all of the hardware for heated seats, heated steering wheels, everything you'd want for driving your fancy German car on a cold New England night built into your vehicle. But you won't be able to turn on that heated seat or steering wheel unless you buy the Bentley cozy ride package for $49.99 a month. All the buttons are there, ceramic coils or whatever it is that actually heats up the inside of your cushion is there. And it's actually cheaper for the car manufacturers to just build all their cars with the same features inside this way instead of just pulling some of them off the assembly line before they get to the heated seats part. But you can't use those heated seats because of software locks. Your butt remains chilly because of ones and zeros. But of course cars are not the first consumer devices to get bound up by digital rights management. Companies have tried to lock the media on Blu-ray players and DVDs to prevent people from copying them. Companies have tried putting restrictions on game consoles so that they'll only play games when the disc is inserted into the console. Even after you've installed the game to your console's hard drive so that it'll boot faster it still isn't gonna play without the disc inserted. And most people don't know any different because they've never had a game console or a Blu-ray that wasn't laced with DRM. And they don't realize that these machines don't have to function this way. Of course cars are a bit of a different story because they came before computers which is why you might hear some old-timers say that putting computers into cars was one of the worst decisions ever made. And you know in a way they're on the right track because of course these locks that I'm talking about are made out of software. But the real problem is not computers in cars or software in cars. It's non-free software that the user doesn't control which means that the software is controlling the user. Maybe if we took the free software foundation a little more seriously back in the mid-80s we wouldn't be in this current DRM dystopia. But there is some hope. You see even though the software and firmware that is running on modern cars is absolutely proprietary it's still your car. It's your own personal property. And while the source code may not necessarily be available to you it's still just zeros and ones which are really just electrical pulses at the physical layer at the end of the day. And so if you can manage to hook up your own electrical wires to the chips or logic boards of your own car and send your own electrical pulses into it some interesting things could happen like unlocking those heated seats in your Tesla for free. That's what a group of security researchers managed to do with Tesla's current AMD based vehicles. And this exploit is impossible to fix. So we might one day see the development of some kind of all in one kit that can pull off this hack for you and instructions for how to use the kit on TikTok and then normal people will be able to do what these PhD InfoSec students did to their Tesla or to the Tesla that was donated to them. So the process of executing this exploit is actually supposed to be shown at this year's Black Hat Convention. So definitely check that out when it comes out. But what we know so far about it is that this exploit utilizes an already known hardware exploit against a component in the AMD based media control unit known as MCUZ. And of course we've heard from the researchers that this particular hardware exploit is impossible to patch with some kind of over the air software update. So as long as these Teslas don't get recalled or you don't allow, I guess, some weird mechanic that wants to swap out your vulnerable chips for patched ones to do that job on your fancy electric American car, then these Teslas are gonna be jailbreakable for all time. Now here's the part of this hack that feels a bit like cosmic justice. This is the kind of karma that I wish more manufacturers would face when injecting DRM into their products. So two years ago, a white paper titled One Glitch to Rule Them All, Fault Injection Attacks Against AMD's Secure Encrypted Virtualization was published. And if we look closely, we can see our boy, Hans Nicholas Jacobs' name is on both of these papers, the one about the glitched chips and the one about this Tesla hack. And both of these write-ups are mostly done by TU Berlin students, and of course both involve hardware vulnerabilities against AMD chips. So I think it's safe to say that these two white papers and these two exploits are going to be related to one another, and so we could probably read the abstract of this paper here to better understand how the hack on the vulnerable Teslas takes place. So AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization offers protection mechanisms for virtual machines in untrusted environments through memory and registry encryption to separate security-sensitive operations from software executing on the main x86 cores. SEV leverages the AMD Secure Processor, AMD SP. This paper introduces a new approach to attack SEV-protected virtual machines by targeting the AMD SP. So in case you didn't know, AMD's Secure Processor is basically a separate processor inside of both consumer grade and enterprise AMD CPUs. It's kind of similar to the Intel Management Engine. The end user doesn't have any real control over this separate CPU. Can't be disabled by the end user. The code running on these processors is closed source and these management engines or Secure Processors are also able to remotely control computers. So basically these chips are seen by a lot of people in the digital privacy world as the final boss of digital spookiness because it really doesn't matter what operating system you install on your computer, what VPN you use, or if you try to route all your traffic through Tor, it doesn't matter what browser you use. If someone can access this Management Engine or the Secure Processor inside of your CPU, then they can see everything that you're doing. They can even turn on your PC remotely. And the end user would have no idea what's happening. You could just exfiltrate data right under somebody's nose. So the abstract goes on to say that we present a voltage glitching attack that allows an attacker to execute custom payloads on the AMD Secure Processors of all microarchitectures that support SEV currently on the market. So this is Zen 1, Zen 2, and Zen 3. The presented method allows us to deploy a custom SEV firmware on the AMD Secure Processor which enables an adversary to decrypt a VM's memory. Furthermore, using our approach, we can extract endorsement keys of SEV-enabled CPUs which allows us to fake attestation reports or to pose as a valid target for VM migration without requiring physical access to the target host. Moreover, we reverse engineered the version ship endorsement key mechanism introduced with SEV Secure Nested Paging. The VCEK binds the endorsement keys to the firmware version of TCB components relevant for SEV. Building on the ability to extract the endorsement keys, we show how to derive valid VCEKs for arbitrary firmware versions. So the reason that Tesla can't patch this bug is because the problem lies within the black box code of the Secure Processor that probably only a handful of AMD employees have seen and probably even a smaller amount of them really understand the ins and outs of. So I salute these researchers for finding a way to fight DRM with DRM. People could use this to save thousands of dollars on add-on features. I mean, some of them, like I believe the acceleration boost by itself cost a couple thousand dollars. That's an example of a feature that you could unlock for free with this flaw. And this could probably also be used to anonymize the location of your vehicle on Tesla servers because by default, your Tesla is constantly phoning home. It's constantly telling Tesla what your car's location is and that's really not necessary. I mean, the only reason something like that might be necessary is if you're using, I guess Tesla's GPS or their built-in maps feature. But if you wanna use Google Maps, Apple Maps or any of the other maps vendors, then there's no reason for Tesla to constantly know where your vehicle is. But this is still a security vulnerability at the end of the day. And we've gotta remember, this is something that could be used maliciously. The paper from 2021 mentions at the end of the abstract that a rogue administrator in a data center could use these flaws to hack into a customer's VPS without their knowledge. And since this lets you execute arbitrary code on Teslas, essentially, someone might be able to use this to hack your car and make it accelerate into a tree. Kinda like what many people believe the CIA did to assassinate WikiLeaks journalist Michael Hastings 10 years ago. And make it look like an accident. So yeah, DRM can be incredibly dangerous, especially when it introduces unpatchable security flaws into motor vehicles. Some of the most dangerous machines that any of us will ever interact with. DRM doesn't just harm consumers though. It also harms businesses, as we can see here. And as our cars, appliances, and even firearms become more and more computerized, these businesses are gonna be faced with a decision. Do we base the security models of these computers and these chips on transparency, making their source code available to anyone to audit it for bugs, or even change it to their machine specifications to make it run as they wish? Or are they just going to continue to rely on this security through obscurity?