Security Research on Mercedes-Benz: From Hardware to Car Control

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Presented at BlackHat USA 2020 by

Minrui Yan

Jiahao Li

Guy Harpak

Nowadays, more and more intelligent functionalities have been introduced to modern cars, which also brings more attack surfaces to the cars. As a car security research team, we like to learn more about the luxury cars' design and development, so we initiated the research on Mercedes-Benz in 2018.In this talk, we will discuss how to perform security research on Connected Cars. First of all, we will talk about how to build a testbench with relevant intelligent components at a low cost. Secondly, we design an attack chain from the outside to the inside of the vehicle based on this testbench. Thirdly, we perform the attack chain in a genuine car. This talk will explain how we researched a Mercedes-Benz E-Class car and found the vulnerabilities. By exploiting these vulnerabilities, we can remotely unlock the door and start the engine and they potentially impact all Mercedes-Benz connected cars in China (estimated over 2 million).