Subaru Starlink flaw allowed experts to remotely hack cars
January 25, 2025
Subaru Starlink flaw exposed vehicles and customer accounts in the US, Canada, and Japan to remote attacks.
Popular security researcher Sam Curry and he colleague Shubham Shah discovered a vulnerability in Subaru’s Starlink connected vehicle service that exposed vehicles and customer accounts in the US, Canada, and Japan susceptible to remote attacks.
The experts explained that they exploited the flaw to gain unrestricted targeted access to all vehicles and customer accounts in the above countries.
A remote attacker who knows the victim’s last name and ZIP code, email address, phone number, or license plate could exploit the flaw to control the vehicles, access location history, personal data (PII), billing info, vehicle PINs, and detailed user records.
Curry confirmed that after reporting the vulnerability, the company patched it within 24 hours.
The duo found Subaru’s admin panel hosted on a subdomain, allowing password resets for employee accounts without confirmation, bypassing two-factor authentication.
Researchers discovered Subaru’s STARLINK admin panel via subdomain scans linked to employee functionality.
“He noticed that ‘my.subaru.com’ (a domain that the MySubaru app was using) was a CNAME for ‘mys.prod.subarucs.com’ (a domain that I hadn’t seen before).” wrote Curry. “We ran a scan to find other subdomains and checked the output:
STARLINK® Admin Portal - https://portal.prod.subarucs.com/login.html
Well, that definitely looked like employee functionality. From a quick Google, it appeared that STARLINK was the name of Subaru’s in-vehicle infotainment system which provided all of the remote functionality for the vehicle. This appeared to be an admin panel related to it.”
Curry analyzed the website source code and noticed some JavaScript files under the “/assets/_js/” folder that were loaded into the login page.
After a few minutes of running FFuF, he got a hit for a “login.js” file, then he noticed a “resetPassword.json” endpoint that would reset employee’s accounts without a confirmation token.
After a few attempts, the researchers discovered that they needed a valid employee email, which was found through OSINT research.
Researchers used the valid employee email to reset the password, bypass two-factor authentication, and gain access to the panel’s functionality. Admin panel access exposed vehicle data (e.g., location history, VIN) and customer info (e.g., name, ZIP, phone, email, billing details).
To confirm their findings, the researchers reached out to their friend and asked if they could hack her car.
She agreed and sent them her license plate, and then they pulled up her vehicle in the admin panel and added them to her car.
“We waited a few minutes, then we saw that our account had been created successfully.” added Curry. “Now that we had access, I asked if they could peek outside and see if anything was happening with their car. I sent the “unlock” command. They then sent us this video. Afterwards, she confirmed that she did not receive any notification, text message, or email after we added ourselves as an authorized user and unlocked her car.
The experts reported the vulnerability to the carmaker on November 20, 2024, and the company fixed it within 24 hours after receiving the report.
Below is the video PoC published by Curry:
In June 2024, a team of experts (Neiko Rivera, Sam Curry, Justin Rhinehart, Ian Carroll) including Curry, discovered multiple vulnerabilities in Kia vehicles that allowed remote control of key functions using their license plates. The researchers demonstrated how to execute the attack in about 30 seconds on any hardware-equipped vehicle, regardless of its Kia Connect subscription status. Additionally, attackers could secretly obtain personal information such as the victim’s name, phone number, email, and physical address. This would allow the attacker to add themselves as a second, hidden user on the victim’s vehicle without their knowledge.
In 2022, some of the members of the above team of experts including the popular cybersecurity expert Sam Curry, discovered another set of vulnerabilities impacting over a dozen car makers.
The vulnerabilities could have been exploited by threat actors to perform a broad range of malicious activities, from unlocking cars to tracking them.
The flaws discovered by the experts affected vehicles of popular brands, including Kia, Honda, Infiniti, Nissan, Acura, Mercedes-Benz, Genesis, BMW, Rolls Royce, Ferrari, Ford, Porsche, Toyota, Jaguar, Land Rover. The research team also discovered flaws in the services provided by Reviver, SiriusXM, and Spireon.
Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon
Pierluigi Paganini
(SecurityAffairs – hacking, Subaru Starlink)