Anyone Within Bluetooth Range Can Take Over This Humanoid Robot — and America's Robot Ban Doesn't Reach the Ones Already Here
About This Episode
Security researcher Olivier Laflamme published two CVEs on August 27 showing that a person within Bluetooth range of a Unitree G1 humanoid — no pairing, no password — can gain root control of the computer that runs its motors, cameras, microphones and collision detection. The decisive flaw was an authorization check Unitree's cloud never performed, and a compromised robot can attack other robots nearby. It lands a month after the FCC put foreign advanced robotic devices on its Covered List, a rule that blocks new models from authorization but explicitly leaves already-authorized robots free to be imported, sold and used.
Our Take
Washington answered Chinese humanoids with a list of who is allowed to build them, and a week later one researcher showed the actual danger was a missing permission check that no list of vendors could ever catch.