How I Hacked My Car
upstart writes:
Last summer I bought a 2021 Hyundai Ioniq SEL. It is a nice fuel-efficient hybrid with a decent amount of features like wireless Android Auto/Apple CarPlay, wireless phone charging, heated seats, & a sunroof.
One thing I particularly liked about this vehicle was the In-Vehicle Infotainment (IVI) system. As I mentioned before it had wireless Android Auto which seemed to be uncommon in this price range, and it had pretty nice, smooth animations in its menus which told me the CPU/GPU in it wasn't completely underpowered, or at least the software it was running wasn't super bloated.
As with many new gadgets I get, I wanted to play around with it and ultimately see what I could do with it.
The IVI in the car, like many things these days, is just a computer. My goal was to hack the IVI to get root access and hopefully be able to run my own software on it. Of course, the first step in hacking a device like this is research.
Some of the obvious things that I looked up were:
- What is the device running?
- There are two versions of the IVI, the navigation one that runs Android, and a Linux based one.
- Has anyone else hacked this before?
- The Android based, navigation version is easy to hack by installing your own APKs through the engineering menu.
- The linux based one has not been hacked.
- Does the non-navigation IVI have an Engineering Mode?
I love developer settings and test apps. There is usually tons of fun to be had playing around with them. I thought I might even get lucky and it would have an option to enable an SSH server or the like.
This is one of those summaries that can never do the full article justice. The only option is to read the linked article - I found it well worth the read! [JR]
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