Jason Veara | Searcharxiv

arXiv2025

Security Analysis of LTE Connectivity in Connected Cars: A Case Study of Tesla

Modern connected vehicles rely on persistent LTE connectivity to enable remote diagnostics, over-the-air (OTA) updates, and safety-relevant services. While mobile network vulnerabilities are well documented in the smartphone ecosystem, their impact in safety-relevant automotive settings remains insufficiently examined. We conduct a black-box case study of LTE security in Tesla's Model 3 and Cybertruck, revealing systemic protocol weaknesses and architectural misconfigurations in connected vehicles. We find that Tesla's telematics stack is susceptible to IMSI catching, rogue base station hijacking, and insecure fallback mechanisms that may silently degrade service availability. Furthermore, legacy control-plane configurations allow for silent SMS injection and broadcast message spoofing without driver awareness. While the vulnerabilities are grounded in Tesla, this case study suggests broader implications for connected-vehicle telematics and for regulatory frameworks such as ISO/SAE 21434 and UN R155/R156, which assume secure, traceable, and resilient telematics in modern vehicles.

cs.CR↗

arXiv2025

TBRD: TESLA Authenticated UAS Broadcast Remote ID

Mysterious sightings of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) over U.S. military facilities, suburban neighborhoods, and commercial airports have intensified scrutiny of drone activity. To increase accountability, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) introduced a Remote ID mandate, requiring unmanned aircraft to broadcast their location, operator's location, and identity in real-time. However, current standards leave authentication mechanisms underspecified, enabling spoofing, relay, and replay attacks that can undermine surveillance efforts and potentially disrupt UAS-to-UAS coordination in future deployments. In this paper, we propose TBRD, a practical system for authenticating Remote ID messages in a manner that aligns with existing standards and UAS capabilities. TBRD leverages the TESLA protocol and mobile device TEEs, and introduces a verification mechanism to build a lightweight, mission-scoped authentication system that is both computationally efficient and requires a low communication footprint. We evaluate the performance of TBRD using both an FAA-requirements compatible proof-of-concept implementation for performance metrics and a simulated 4-drone swarm mission scenario to demonstrate its security guarantees under adversarial conditions. Our system provides a 50\% reduction in authentication overhead compared to digital signatures and a 100x reduction in computation time. Our results demonstrate that TBRD can be integrated into current Remote ID infrastructures to provide a scalable, standards-compliant message authentication for both regulatory and operational use cases.

cs.CR↗