Mercedes-Benz Collaborates With Tencent Keen Lab To Strengthen IT Security

Mercedes-Benz is strengthening and ensuring trustful protection of its customer data and safety. In order to achieve this goal, it is essential to leverage the skills of the worldwide community. Therefore, our company values the work of researchers who spend time and effort helping Mercedes-Benz provide security that meets the speed and the needs to enable innovation. Tencent Security Keen Lab researchers have been conducting an in-depth and comprehensive analysis of both hardware and software of MBUX – Mercedes-Benz User Experience.

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In their eight-month's research, Tencent Keen Lab has tested the MBUX Infotainment System.

In their eight-months' research, Tencent Keen Lab has tested the MBUX Infotainment System. The Keen Lab team found several security issues on MBUX and successfully exploited some attack surfaces on the head unit and T-Box. They have gained first physical access and as a consequence of this subsequently remote access to the main infotainment ECU: the head unit. This enabled them to perform certain infotainment vehicle functions remotely (i.e. change internal lighting colors, display images on infotainment screen…). Furthermore they demonstrated how to compromise an internal chip on the T-Box, which was proved by sending arbitrary CAN messages from a debug (non-production) version T-Box. Simultaneously, both sides joined forces to develop solutions for the findings and already started with the rollout of the fixes. This was only possible due to the excellent research by the Tencent Security Keen Lab team as well as the close collaboration with the Mercedes-Benz experts which started immediately after Keen Lab informed the company in December 2020.

“The expertise of the security community all over the world is absolutely valuable to us in order to continuously improve our vehicle security”, said Adi Ofek, CEO of Mercedes-Benz Tel Aviv and holding the mandate for car IT security at Mercedes-Benz. “Therefore, we highly appreciate the expertise of Tencent Security Keen Lab. In addition to their profound know-how I would like to thank the Keen Lab team for the productive collaboration which we would like to continue in future.”