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

EPSS: 0.005 (42.3th percentile) — read the EPSS interpretation.