By reverse engineering the 2014 Renault Latitude’s firmware and exploiting some vulnerabilities, the researcher fixed their daylight savings time mismatch issue.
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Moorats had been warned. When he bought the used car, the previous owner noted that the SD card would be required to change the time on the in-car display. “I didn't really find that believable,” recalls the security researcher. They seem to have believed it was a skill issue of the prior owner and, because the maps it contained were chronically out of date, they decided to confidently decide they didn’t need the SD card…
With a certain set of skills under his belt, Moorats decided to “just RE it,” where RE = reverse engineer . He found out that the head unit ran a customized Linux-based TomTom operating system on a Samsung SoC. In brief, he extracted and analyzed the firmware, built a QEMU environment for the device, reversed the scripting engine, and uncovered a number of vulnerabilities affecting the system.
The breakthrough came in a brainwave, which seems to stem from experience with kernel exploit techniques during his day job. “Instead of trying to get the userland to execute our script, why don't I get the kernel to execute our script instead?” pondered Moorats. The approach worked, rewarding Moorats with root-level access to the infotainment system.
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The 2014 Renault Latitude owner subsequently discovered that the date & time settings were in /mnt/flash/settings.dat in a custom binary format. Interestingly, the system “doesn't really have a concept of time zones at all,” observed Moorats in the conclusion of his blog post. “It gets the time from GPS and stores the local offset as a number of minutes. Mine was set to 180. I changed it to 120.”
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- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/security-researcher-had-to-jailbreak-their-car-just-to-update-the-clock-missing-tomtom-sd-card-locked-settings-menu-custom-linux-exploit-deployed-to-adjust-daylight-saving-time#main
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