What’s Vulnerable › Vulnerabilities

CVE-2025-34251: Tesla Telematics Control Unit (TCU) < v2025.14 Authentication Bypass

• Severity: high (CVSS 8.6 v4.0)
• Exploited in the wild: not listed in CISA KEV
• EPSS: 0.4% probability of exploitation in the next 30 days
• Public exploit or detection template: none known
• Published: 2025-10-07 · updated 2026-10-09
• Weakness: CWE-269

Description

Tesla Telematics Control Unit (TCU) firmware prior to v2025.14 contains an authentication bypass vulnerability. The TCU runs the Android Debug Bridge (adbd) as root and, despite a “lockdown” check that disables adb shell, still permits adb push/pull and adb forward. Because adbd is privileged and the device’s USB port is exposed externally, an attacker with physical access can write an arbitrary file to a writable location and then overwrite the kernel’s uevent_helper or /proc/sys/kernel/hotplug entries via ADB, causing the script to be executed with root privileges.

Affected products

• Tesla Telematics Control Unit (TCU): before 2025.14 — fixed in 2025.14

How to fix

Upgrade to a fixed version: Tesla Telematics Control Unit (TCU) 2025.14. Check the vendor advisory for mitigations.

References

• https://www.nccgroup.com/research-blog/technical-advisory-tesla-telematics-control-unit-adb-auth-bypass/
• https://www.tesla.com/
• https://www.vulncheck.com/advisories/tesla-tcu-auth-bypass

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