Tesla’s efforts to deliver unhackable cars have translated into significant investments into its cybersecurity over the last years and 2020 finds the electric company even more willing to remove any vulnerability from its cars.
The company plans to return to Pwn2Own, a hacking competition held in Vancouver, and challenge the participating hackers to crack its vehicles. Whoever manages to identify and exploit bugs in the car’s security system gets to be rewarded with $1 Million in cash and prizes. A few Model 3s are also on the line.
Last year, during the same competition, a hacking duo took control over the infotainment system on the company’s Model 3 by using a JIT bug in the renderer”. The competition finished with the two hackers going home with a new Model 3.
This year the company plans to up the challenge and is willing to pay accordingly. Regarding the company’s participation in this year’s Pwn2Own, David Lau, vice president of vehicle software at Tesla said:
“We develop our cars with the highest standards of safety in every respect, and our work with the security research community is invaluable to us. Since launching our bug bounty program in 2014 — the first to include a connected consumer vehicle — we have continuously increased our investments into partnerships with security researchers to ensure that all Tesla owners constantly benefit from the brightest minds in the community. We look forward to learning about, and rewarding, great work in Pwn2Own so that we can continue to improve our products and our approach to designing inherently secure systems.”
Pwn2Own will be held in March. Find out more about the rules for the contest here.
