CVE-2018-18203 — A vulnerability in the update mechanism of Subaru StarLink Harman head units 201

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

01What is this vulnerability?

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…

02Affected products

Vendor	Product	Versions
n	a / n/a	n/a

03Active exploitation status

Not currently listed on the CISA Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog. EPSS is the best forward-looking signal — see the EPSS row above.

04Recommended remediation

• Patch to a fixed version listed in the vendor advisory (see references below).
• Mitigate with WAF rules, network egress filters, or feature flags where the patch is not yet available.
• Hunt historical logs for exploitation indicators — see Detection signatures below.

05Technical details

For the full vendor write-up, exploit chains, and reference implementations, see the references list in section 09.

06Detection signatures

Ask SARA in chat to draft a starting detection for this CVE in your stack of choice.

07Related CVEs

No directly-cited follow-up CVEs in the KB record for this advisory. The references list in section 09 carries the vendor cross-references.

08Timeline

• Published: 2018-11-28T23:00:00.000Z
• Last modified: 2024-08-05T11:01:14.944Z

09References

• github.com — https://github.com/sgayou/subaru_starlink_research