Reversing Kia Motors Head Unit to discover and exploit software vulnerabilities

Abstract

Modern vehicles resemble four-wheels computers connected to the Internet via their In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) systems. As with PCs in the past, cars, being connected to the Internet can be potentially vulnerable. The IVI system of a car is part of the intra-vehicle network and can be the entry-point of offensive cybersecurity attacks. The intra-vehicle network, based on the CAN protocol, is vulnerable by design: messages are exchanged in clear. Thus, the uncontrolled access to the CAN bus may have serious impact on the vehicle itself and its passengers. In this paper, we present a vulnerability assessment, through a reverse engineering process, of Kia vehicles IVI system. In particular, we focused on reverse engineer the Kia IVI system to discover vulnerabilities that may allow an attacker to compromise the IVI functionalities and inject CAN frames into the CAN bus to alter the behaviour of (part of) the vehicle. By reverse engineering the IVI, we identified four important vulnerabilities that affect all Kia vehicles that embed the studied IVI. Finally, we show how an attacker can easily control the IVI and inject CAN bus frames by means of a Metasploit module that we wrote.