Privilege escalation in Tesla Telematics Control Unit (Tcu)

CVE-2025-34251

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.

Vulnerability class: Privilege Escalation

Published · last modified .

EPSS exploit prediction

EPSS: 0.004 (36.5th percentile), scored .

Very low probability of exploitation in the next 30 days; routine patching cadence is appropriate. 36th percentile — 36.5% of CVEs in the catalogue have a lower EPSS than this one. How to read EPSS.

EPSS trend (30 days)EPSS over the last 30 days for CVE-2025-34251: held from 0.005 to 0.004.

EPSS over last 30 days · oldest: 0.005 · newest: 0.004 · change: -0.001

Affected products

Weakness classification (CWE)

References