Looking at the Internals of th... Note

Looking at the Internals of the Kenwood DMX958XR IVI

The Kenwood DMX958XR is a compact in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) head unit that offers various functionalities such as Android Auto, Apple CarPlay, and USB media playback. It consists of multiple interconnected boards, with the most interesting components located on the top and bottom of the main board. The main board includes a video processing IC, PMIC, NAND flash, and two DDR3 SDRAMs on the top side, and a Murata radio module, Telechips TCC8974 SoC, SDRAM, and eMMC on the bottom side. The Telechips TCC8974 SoC is a 32-bit ARM core that supports running Android, Linux, and QNX, and has multimedia hardware acceleration capabilities. Other boards in the unit serve purposes such as GPS, audio processing, and camera operations. A hidden debugging interface on the main board exposes a Linux login prompt over UART at 115200bps, allowing for a root shell to be spawned with the correct credentials. The DMX958XR is one of the targets for the upcoming Pwn2Own Automotive contest, which aims to test the security of IVI systems. The contest will be held in January 2025 at the Automotive World conference in Tokyo.