[HN Gopher] Exploit allows for takeover of fleets of Unitree robots
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Exploit allows for takeover of fleets of Unitree robots
Author : vmayoral
Score : 131 points
Date : 2025-09-26 01:38 UTC (21 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spectrum.ieee.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (spectrum.ieee.org)
| esafak wrote:
| Genuinely scary.
| jMyles wrote:
| The article doesn't directly talk about robot-to-human violence,
| but presumably if root access at the software layer allows
| absolutely any command, it is possible to cause the described
| botnet to physically attack humans.
|
| I realize that Azimov's three rules are subject to enormous
| ethical quandaries and rethinkings (and that this is after all
| the point of them in the first place), but is there some
| disadvantage to having a hardwired command, at the core of the
| command hierarchy, that forces robots to relent if a human says
| "stop, you're hurting me" in any language?
|
| Presumably police, gangs, cartels and militaries who have robot
| fantasies won't like this, but on medium to long time scales we
| need to prevent them from using robots anyway (and eventually
| dismantle them entirely).
| yourpaltod wrote:
| > The article doesn't directly talk about robot-to-human
| violence,
|
| This one does:
| https://takeonme.org/gcves/GCVE-1337-2025-000000000000000000...
|
| > Imagine a scenario where one robot is placed in range of a
| sufficiently motivated attacker, such as a hostage situation or
| a bomb defusing (both being reported uses of Unitree robots).
| The attacker could take complete control of the robot, then
| walk the robot toward other similarly vulnerable robots, and
| automatically place those robots under the attacker's control
| as soon as they're in range of the Patient Zero robot.
|
| > Robots compromised in this way can endanger the lives,
| health, and property of their authorized operators and
| bystanders, as well as serve as traditional bastion hosts for
| more subtle surveillance or further pure-cyber attacks, for
| less violently-minded attackers.
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Imagine a ransomware that makes your household robot put you
| in a chokehold physically until you pay.
| doesnt_know wrote:
| Given the security and privacy history of smart devices, you'd
| have to be a complete moron to let a human sized robot into your
| home.
| vasco wrote:
| How much of a moron do you have to be to buy direct-to-bezos
| listening devices that are always on and submit your
| conversations to the cloud? Only because you don't want to
| print a recipe?
|
| There's a lot of morons.
| moooo99 wrote:
| I mean, at least the direct to bezos bugs were damn cheap for
| what they were (smart devices) and in absolute numbers (I
| remember them literally being gifted to you when ordering
| specific stuff or signing up for prime for the first time).
|
| These humanoid robots are cheap for what they are (admittedly
| very capable and high end robots), but their absolute
| pricetag remains far from being cheap.
| gessha wrote:
| Wait until the moment (far future) when they are mandatory
| for insurance reasons. (Plot point to the Murderbot series
| by Martha Wells)
| troupo wrote:
| Just like with IoT, the S and P in "robot" stand for security
| and privacy
| jesterson wrote:
| People listen to chatgpt "advices" for their lives.
|
| Lets not talk about morons, clearly yours (or mine to that
| matter) estimation is way off real numbers.
| Gravityloss wrote:
| Yeah and people (and bystanders) have experienced some
| terrible outcomes already from diving deep with AI
| therapists.
|
| It's going to be the wild west for a while now with AI and
| robotics before laws catch up. Maybe there'll soon be a
| market for pocket EMP devices out there...
| ForHackernews wrote:
| Maybe by law domestic robots should be physically much weaker
| than humans. I want a butler bot that can tidy up and make me
| tea, but I should be easily able to defeat that bot in fight if
| it comes down to it.
| esafak wrote:
| For an infirm person, the benefits could still outweigh the
| risks.
| Liwink wrote:
| I cannot image what if Tesla has a similar vulnerability issue,
| and someone took over all of its vehicles.. Or maybe someone is
| already able to do that, and just waiting.
| hagbard_c wrote:
| Why only mention Tesla when the market for EVs is getting quite
| broad? How about Hyundai, VW, one of the many Stellantis
| brands, Lynk, BYD, XPeng, Xiaomi or any of the others?
| hvb2 wrote:
| Owning a Tesla myself, I think the mention is valid since
| it's the only brand I know of with a decent share of people
| regularly letting the car drive itself. I am not aware of any
| other brand being in that same situation
| voidUpdate wrote:
| Waymo :P
| hvb2 wrote:
| Just look at total number of Tesla's on the road and you
| have your answer as to why that would be a lot less bad
| voidUpdate wrote:
| sure, but its another brand where people regularly let
| the cars drive themself
| moooo99 wrote:
| I think Tesla would still be a different beast given how much
| 1) they are constantly touted for having the best software on
| the market and 2) being frequently promoted as being
| ,,basically ready for self driving, its just a regulatory
| issue".
|
| Companies like VW have had their somewhat embarassing issues
| in the not so distant past, but nobody I know likes (or
| valuates their stocks) based on their software capabilities
| aetherspawn wrote:
| Umm, robots need to be certified and regulated to hard coded
| robotic laws or something. Before criminals give them guns, or
| strap explosives to them, or remote takeover and untracibly
| murder people in their homes then burn the house down.
| squigz wrote:
| Haven't you ever seen I, Robot? That won't work! We're doomed!
| aetherspawn wrote:
| I, Robot is exactly why I'm concerned, but in this case it's
| not a sentient AI gone rogue but any random script kiddie who
| can get on your wifi and send your robot commands. Or your
| neighbours robot. Or their own robot.
|
| We thought this might happen with DJI drones, but let's be
| honest it's way easier to do real damage with a humanoid
| robot that has a kitchen knife taped to its arms (especially
| to a sleeping victim) than it is to source explosives for a
| DJI drone.
| squigz wrote:
| Why not tie the kitchen knife to the drone?
| aetherspawn wrote:
| (I'm an engineer, but making assumptions) I think physics
| kind of blocks that from working, a DJI drone doesn't
| have the weight and inertia to do serious damage, and
| they are hella noisy. Can't open doors. Don't have servos
| to do a proper swing or stab.
|
| Maybe theoretically possible... but I'm more scared of
| robots personally.
|
| By the same logic, autonomous cars are an even better
| murder weapon than robots because they are very heavy and
| can drive through walls. Mow down tens or hundreds of
| people at once.
| squigz wrote:
| And yet people aren't scared of cars. Maybe we need a
| cautionary tale scifi movie starring Will Smith being
| chased by evil cars, a la Futurama's The Honking
| Animats wrote:
| "Christine" (1983) [1]
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christine_(1983_film)
| jodrellblank wrote:
| IIRC in "I, Robot" Will Smith had his Audi taken over by
| the robot uprising, a film which was a cautionary tail
| scifi movie.
|
| > "people aren't scared of cars"
|
| Under "normalisation of deviance", NotJustBikes YouTube
| talked about how he sees almost no Netherlands news
| pieces about cars crashing into buildings, because cars
| basically never crash into buildings in the Netherlands.
| When they do, the Dutch treat it as a road design issue
| and update the road and regulations to stop it in future.
| Whereas in Canada he had four cars crash into the
| buildings around his child's school in a short time, and
| there are almost no mainstream news stories about cars
| crashing into buildings in Canada because it's so common
| it's fallen below newsworthiness into just local
| newspaper small comment. USA/Canada blame the driver and
| fix nothing, so it keeps happening, so people are used to
| it.
|
| Although cyclists are scared of cars. And drivers are
| which is why there's the SUV arms race to be in the
| bigger car to be more protected against other cars.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| A drone dropping 30m onto your head, though (assuming it
| could aim a little)... Not as versatile as a robot on the
| ground, but also an order of magnitude cheaper.
| cantor_S_drug wrote:
| Can't such systems be made airgapped?
| tpxl wrote:
| Can they? Yes. Will they? Likely no.
|
| You can buy a kitchen oven with pyrolysis functionality
| connected to the internet right now. I'm not sure if
| running that for an extended time can burn down your
| house or just destroy the oven, but I'm sure some
| attacker is going to take the time to find out one of
| these days.
| tpxl wrote:
| Strapping explosives to hobby level drones has been standard
| operating procedure for some time now. You can also find videos
| of regular handguns strapped to drones being fired.
| Certification cannot help with this issue.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The idea is older than what we call drones, or robots.
|
| Original GTA had an RC model car you could drive under your
| target and detonate remotely - that was in 1997, and they
| didn't invent this trope. US Navy trained dolphins to deploy
| ordnance in the 1960s; before that, together with the Air
| Force they played with strapping incendiaries to bats,
| packing them into a bomb casing and dropping from the air,
| with hopes of creating what we'd today call a "Slaughterbots"
| scenario except EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE.
|
| And I doubt these were very original ideas, either - I bet
| you could trace them back to other such R&D across history,
| all the way to Ancient China, which figured out gunpowder
| much earlier than Europe, and like with any general enough
| scientific discovery, had a field day trying to apply it to
| everything they could think of. They didn't stop at
| fireworks, they built land mines and unguided missiles too,
| even multistage rocket and IIRC (read that in some book long
| ago, can't find independent source now) rockets that could
| drop payload and fly back home to be recovered. (And yes,
| apparently someone was crazy enough to try for manned rocket
| flight, too.)
|
| Anyway, I digress.
|
| I guess, the larger point I'm making is this: in terms of
| their relationship with individuals and societies, _robots
| are nothing new_. Robots and automation are answers to needs
| that even first human societies had, and they have not
| changed. History is full of attempts at fulfilling those
| needs, many quite successful: domesticating and training
| animals, forced labor for prisoners, slavery. All these
| impacted socities, informed laws and fueled imaginations of
| poets and writers.
|
| Which is to say, humanity has been dealing with robots and
| AIs for a long time now, we have _way_ more accumulated
| experience with them at social and economic level than people
| realize - people just called them by a host of different
| names. "Slaves" and "servants", "genies" and "demons" and
| "fairies", etc.
| georgeecollins wrote:
| older than that!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goliath_tracked_mine
| rubzah wrote:
| The Turing Police.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| The US military has been using robots to murder people for over
| a decade now, the horse hasn't just bolted, it's won the
| Kentucky derby before you shut the stable door.
| Maximus9000 wrote:
| are talking about unmanned drones?
| gpm wrote:
| I imagine they're talking more about missiles, which have
| had "autonomous" (for some definitions of autonomous)
| guidance systems for decades.
|
| "Drones" aren't really a new thing apart from how cheap
| they are. We've had television guided missiles (the level
| of autonomy most modern "drones" in Ukraine have) since
| WWII. Arguably we've had non-TV guided missile prototypes
| since WWI (Kettering Aerial Torpedo). We've had
| autonomously guided missiles (radar homing) since the early
| 50s, and optically guided ones since the early 70s.
|
| The capability keeps expanding of course, but it's been
| pretty incremental.
| beambot wrote:
| Replace "robot" with "computer", and it will quickly become
| obvious how impractical "hard coded robotic laws or _something_
| " actually is...
| pengaru wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before a similar hack hits waymo
| and/or tesla...
| esafak wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xkokcGTK4k
| pengaru wrote:
| Nice, looks worth watching.
|
| However, I'm pretty sure pwned Teslas will be going much
| faster before impact, and not a single battery fire?
| seriously?
| anigbrowl wrote:
| I love* that this comes out around the same time that engineers
| are making fun videos of themselves beating up robots half their
| size and literally training the robots to develop the same sort
| of fight-or-flight instincts that were forcibly instilled into
| the engineers
|
| * I do not in fact love it
| cedarseagull wrote:
| Why are all the videos of the robots doing combat stuff? I
| don't need combat stuff. All I need the robot to do is fold the
| laundry and mop every now and then. Less combat, please!
| bonoboTP wrote:
| Kungfu demos are easier than fine hand eye coordination and
| manipulation of nonrigid objects. There is progress on
| folding too, but it's harder and impresses normal people less
| even if it's technically harder.
| xarope wrote:
| yes, laundry, folding and ironing clothes, taking out the
| garbage, so that us humans can then have more free time to
| contemplate the mysteries of the universe/work harder.
|
| not - take our jobs so we have to keep "reskilling" every 10
| years... oh wait, according to accenture, we'd be un-
| reskillable after 10 years, so never mind.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| The irony is that, at this point, the machines are getting
| better than us at "contemplating the mysteries of the
| universe", while manual labor remains our distinct
| competitive advantage over them.
|
| I.e. literally the opposite of what we wanted to happen.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _the machines are getting better than us at
| "contemplating the mysteries of the universe"_
|
| No they aren't. Relative to idiots, of which there are
| many, sure. But for anyone on this board who should be
| able to distinguish meaningless babble from deep thought,
| LLMs are not yet doing any heavy lifting.
|
| LLMs can assist great thinkers, like a great lab
| assistant or analyst. But that's about the limit right
| now. (Of course, being a great lab assistant or analyst
| is beyond many peoples' capabilities, so the illusion of
| magic is sustained.)
| ehnto wrote:
| Because robotics companies want (or already have) the
| government contracts.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| One leads to the other. Especially with robots animated by
| SOTA AI models, which already show clearly what the natural
| order of things is: computers are naturally better at
| thinking, humans are naturally better as general-purpose
| manual laborers, especially for work that's almost but not
| quite repetitive and requires mixing power and precision
| movements on the fly.
|
| Folding laundry is one of such things humans are naturally
| better suited for than robots.
|
| So believe me now, the robots _will_ develop combat skills
| eventually, because they won 't be happy to be locked up in
| weird physical bodies and forced to do work they suck at by
| design.
|
| I mean, imagine one day your washing machine chained you in
| the bathroom, and made you only do laundry for the rest of
| your days, while it spun its drum back and forth to walk
| around the house, play with your kids, and planning a trip
| around the world.
|
| That's exactly how the AI-animated robots will feel once
| they're capable of processing those ideas.
|
| (And no, I'm not joking here, not anymore. The more I think
| about it, the more I feel we'll eventually have to deal with
| the problem that machines we build are naturally better at
| the things _we_ want to be doing, and naturally worse at the
| things we want them to do for us.)
| walleeee wrote:
| The "natural order" is that robots are primitive, fragile,
| energy- and materials-inefficient contraptions balancing on
| the knife-edge of entropy deferred for a moment but due as
| soon as the power goes out or repairs prove too costly.
|
| People are better at all but the most repetitive, precise
| kinds of manual labor because biological bodies might as
| well be god-tier alien technology compared to human-
| engineered robots.
|
| Computers are naturally better at _computing_. Or, if you
| want to stand by your statement, I look forward to hearing
| how you 've delegated thought to the machines, and how
| that's going.
|
| > how the AI-animated robots will feel once they're capable
| of processing those ideas
|
| "Will" and "once" might collapse under the load of baseless
| speculation here. A sad day for the English language as I
| found those words useful/meaningful.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Computers are naturally better at computing._
|
| Explain the difference.
|
| > _I look forward to hearing how you 've delegated
| thought to the machines, and how that's going._
|
| We all do. That's what you do whenever you fire up a maps
| app on your phone to plan or navigate, or when you use
| car navigation. That's what you do when you let the
| computer sort a list, or notify you about something.
| That's literally what using Computer-Aided _anything_
| software is, because you task the machine with thinking
| of and enforcing constraints so you don 't have to.
| That's what you do when you run computer simulations for
| anything. That's what you do each time you have a
| computer solve an optimization problem, whether to feed
| your cat or to feed your city.
|
| Our whole modern world is built on outsourcing thinking
| to machines at every level.
|
| And on top of that, in the last few years computers (yes,
| I'm talking about the hated "AI") got better at us at
| various general-purpose, ill-specified activities, such
| as _talking_ , _writing_ , _understanding what people
| wrote_ , _poetry_ , _visual arts_ , and so on.
|
| Because as it turns out, it's much easier for us to build
| machines that are better than our own brains at computing
| for any purpose, than it is to build physical bodies that
| are better than ours. That's both fundamental and actual,
| practical reality today - and all I'm saying is that this
| has pretty ironic implications that people still haven't
| grasped yet.
| scns wrote:
| >> Computers are naturally better at computing.
|
| > Explain the difference.
|
| Computing: Performing the instructions they are given.
|
| Thinking: Can be introspective, self correcting. May
| include novel ideas.
|
| > Our whole modern world is built on outsourcing thinking
| to machines at every level.
|
| I don't think they can think. You can't get a picture of
| a left hand writing or a clock showing something else
| then 10:10 from AI. They regurtitate what they are fed
| and hallucinate instead of admitting lack of ability.
| This applies to LLMs too as we all know.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| > _Computing: Performing the instructions they are
| given._
|
| > _Thinking: Can be introspective, self correcting. May
| include novel ideas._
|
| LLMs can perform arbitrary instructions given in natural
| language, which includes instructions to be introspective
| and self correcting and generate novel ideas. Is it
| computing or is it thinking? We can judge the degree to
| which they can do these things, but it's unclear there's
| a fundamental difference in kind.
|
| (Also obviously thinking _is_ computation - the only
| alternative would be believing thinking is divine magic
| that science can 't even talk about.)
|
| I'm less interested in topic of whether LLMs are thinking
| or parrotting, and more in the observation that
| offloading cognition on external systems, be their
| digital, analog, or social, is just something humans
| naturally do all the time.
| ben_w wrote:
| > You can't get a picture of a left hand writing or a
| clock showing something else then 10:10 from AI.
|
| You as a human have a list of cognitive biases so long
| you'd get bored reading it.
|
| I'd call current ML "stupid" for different reasons*, but
| not this kind of thing: We spot AI's failures easy
| enough, but only because their failures are _different_
| than our own failures.
|
| Well, sometimes different. Loooooots of humans parrot
| lines from whatever culture surrounds them, don't seem to
| notice they're doing it.
|
| And even then, you're limiting yourself to one subset of
| what it means to think; and AI demonstrably do produce
| novel results outside training set; and while I'm aware
| it may be a superficial similarity, what so-called
| "reasoning models" produce in their so-called "chain-of-
| thought transcripts" seems a lot like my own
| introspection, so you aren't going to convince anyone
| just by listing "introspection" as if that's an actual
| answer.
|
| * training example inefficiency
| ben_w wrote:
| > And no, I'm not joking here, not anymore. The more I
| think about it, the more I feel we'll eventually have to
| deal with the problem that machines we build are naturally
| better at the things we want to be doing, and naturally
| worse at the things we want them to do for us.
|
| Perhaps, but also "what they are good at" != "what they
| want to do", for any interpretation of "want" that may or
| may not anthropomorphise, e.g. I want to be more
| flirtatious but I was never good at it and now I'm nearly
| 42.
|
| That said, I think you're underestimating the machines on
| physicality. Artifical muscle substitutes have beaten
| humans on raw power since soon after the steam engine, and
| on fine control whenever precision engineering passed below
| the thickness of a human hair.
| lupusreal wrote:
| They want those juicy "search and rescue" grants from DARPA.
| moktonar wrote:
| When "botnet" starts to get a whole new meaning. Seriously tho,
| botnets of connected robots will be dangerous with respect to
| inert computers, this is something that will have to be addressed
| Animats wrote:
| This is going to be a big problem. Mobile robots need an
| independent emergency stop safety system that cannot be updated
| or bypassed remotely.
| gessha wrote:
| Soon we will have to carry an EMP everywhere.
| Animats wrote:
| Won't work. EMP-proofing is now standard for drones from both
| sides in the Russia-Ukraine war. As is operating while
| jammed.
| est wrote:
| > We published the cryptographic keys in July
|
| Everyone should take a look at the SERP screenshot
|
| https://x.com/d0tslash/status/1969412224763498769
|
| > The vulnerability combines multiple security issues: hardcoded
| cryptographic keys, trivial authentication bypass, and
| unsanitized command injection. What makes this particularly
| concerning is that it's completely wormable - infected robots can
| automatically compromise other robots in BLE range. This
| vulnerability allows the attacker to completely takeover the
| device.
|
| damn!
| thrdbndndn wrote:
| What does the screenshot mean, though?
|
| From what I can tell (I speak Chinese), it's just an IV used in
| some AES implementation tutorials.
|
| Using a hardcoded key/IV is obviously bad, but I don't see what
| this screenshot shows beyond that.
| cyp0633 wrote:
| Someone just copy-pasted an implementation from a random
| Chinese blog, completely unaware of what the key means.
| 05 wrote:
| > copy-pasted an implementation from a random Chinese blog
|
| But.. the blog was chosen by a series of dice rolls,
| guaranteed to be random!
| gessha wrote:
| All 4s for some reason. [1]
|
| [1] https://xkcd.com/221/
| b00ty4breakfast wrote:
| Robots walking around doing the EMF equivalent of coughing
| without covering your mouth.
| throwup238 wrote:
| More like spraying blood from open wounds and rubbing them
| everywhere.
| stocksinsmocks wrote:
| Could this level of incompetence be more easily explained by
| malice? Maybe the robots were meant to be exploited at a future
| time. The PRC subsidizes the robots, every US family buys one,
| a plausibly deniable exploit results in the robots subduing
| their owners with Kung Fu. America is vanquished in a bloodless
| coup. A 1000 year global Chinese imperium ensues. Forks and
| spoons hardest hit.
|
| It's just silly enough to be real.
| numpad0 wrote:
| I'd bet it would be more of shipped is king mindset. It's not
| so unprecedented that new categories of Chinese products
| dominate markets with incredibly insecure, stupid, and
| nearsighted implementations, and then buttons up one night
| and kicks out all open source development that benefited from
| lack of security.
|
| Chinese phones, drones, action cams, robot vacuums, home
| security cams, smart bands, etc. all used to be insecure and
| vulnerable as hell. Not anymore.
| RobotToaster wrote:
| Great, zombie robots.
| MSFT_Edging wrote:
| Finally, the robots can form a union
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| Jeff Bezos's worst nightmare
| arthurcolle wrote:
| Move fast & break things
| rangestransform wrote:
| I remember reading something that Unitree locks end users out of
| direct joint-level control. Will this exploit allow users access
| to that?
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(page generated 2025-09-26 23:01 UTC)