RESEARCH | September 29, 2022

NFC Relay Attack on Tesla Model Y

Josep Pi Rodriguez, Principal Security Consultant, walks you through the proof-of-concept and technical details of exploitation for the NFC relay attack research on the newest Tesla vehicle, the Model Y. To successfully carry out the attack, IOActive reverse-engineered the NFC protocol Tesla uses between the NFC card and the vehicle, and we then created custom firmware modifications that allowed a Proxmark RDV4.0 device to relay NFC communications over Bluetooth/Wi-Fi using the Proxmark’s BlueShark module.

It is known in the vehicle security industry that NFC relay attacks (as well as Radio Frequency relay attacks) are currently being used to steal cars. This type of attack consists of relaying cryptographic material between the vehicle and the virtual key (NFC card or smartphone).

RESEARCH | November 2, 2020

CVE-2020-16877: Exploiting Microsoft Store Games

TL; DR. This blog post describes a privilege escalation issue in Windows (CVE-2020-16877) I reported to Microsoft back in June, which was patched in October. This issue allows an attacker to exploit Windows via videogames by directly targeting how Windows handles Microsoft Store games. This issue could be exploited to elevate privileges from a standard user account to Local System on Windows 10.

RESEARCH | October 6, 2020

A journey into defeating regulated electronic cigarette protections

TL;DR: This blog post does not encourage smoking nor vaping. The main focus of this blog will be defeating the protections of a regulated electronic cigarette to assess the ability of it being weaponized via a remote attacker by modifying its firmware and delivering it through a malware which waits for electronic cigarettes to be connected over USB or discovered over Bluetooth.