Subaru StarLink Harman Head Unit 2017/2018/2018 Firmware Persistent signature verification

Summaryinfo

A vulnerability has been found in Subaru StarLink Harman Head Unit 2017/2018/2018 and classified as critical. The impacted element is an unknown function of the component Firmware Handler. The manipulation leads to signature verification (Persistent). This vulnerability is uniquely identified as CVE-2018-18203. Local access is required to approach this attack. No exploit exists.

Detailsinfo

A vulnerability was found in Subaru StarLink Harman Head Unit 2017/2018/2018. It has been rated as critical. This issue affects an unknown part of the component Firmware Handler. The manipulation with an unknown input leads to a signature verification vulnerability (Persistent). Using CWE to declare the problem leads to CWE-347. The product does not verify, or incorrectly verifies, the cryptographic signature for data. Impacted is confidentiality, integrity, and availability. The summary by CVE is:

A vulnerability in the update mechanism of Subaru StarLink Harman head units 2017, 2018, and 2019 may give an attacker (with physical access to the vehicle's USB ports) the ability to rewrite the firmware of the head unit. This occurs because the device accepts modified QNX6 filesystem images (as long as the attacker obtains access to certain Harman decryption/encryption code) as a consequence of a bug where unsigned images pass a validity check. An attacker could potentially install persistent malicious head unit firmware and execute arbitrary code as the root user.

The bug was discovered 11/28/2018. The weakness was disclosed 11/28/2018 (Website). The advisory is shared at github.com. The identification of this vulnerability is CVE-2018-18203 since 10/09/2018. An attack has to be approached locally. No form of authentication is needed for a successful exploitation. Neither technical details nor an exploit are publicly available. The price for an exploit might be around USD $5k-$25k at the moment (estimation calculated on 04/16/2020).

There is no information about possible countermeasures known. It may be suggested to replace the affected object with an alternative product.

If you want to get the best quality for vulnerability data then you always have to consider VulDB.

Productinfo

Vendor

• Subaru

Name

• StarLink Harman Head Unit

Version

• 2017
• 2018

CPE 2.3info

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CPE 2.2info

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• 🔍

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