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Anyone Within Bluetooth Range Can Take Over This Humanoid Robot — and America's Robot Ban Doesn't Reach the Ones Already Here · Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts

• 0:00
  [Host] This is Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts, the show where the lock works and the locksmith answers to anyone. Security researcher Olivier Laflamme published two flaws on August twenty-seventh that let anyone within Bluetooth range take root control of a Unitree G1 humanoid.
• 0:18
  [Guest] No pairing. No password. Stand near the machine and you own the computer that moves its legs.
• 0:25
  [Host] We covered the ban on July twenty-eighth, when the Federal Communications Commission put advanced robotic devices on its Covered List. The threat model then was someone abroad reaching in over the internet.
• 0:39
  [Guest] This attacker needs neither the internet nor a login. The robot's Bluetooth took a request from an unpaired phone and handed back an encrypted key package.
• 0:51
  [Host] Encrypted. Isn't that the whole point?
• 0:53
  [Guest] Unitree's cloud held the key that opens it, and the server opened it for any free account that asked. It never checked whether that account owned the robot.
• 1:06
  [Host] So the lock worked and the locksmith opened the door.
• 1:10
  [Guest] That one key unlocks the Bluetooth channel. From there he flooded the robot's Bluetooth software past what it could hold and took root on the body's computer.
• 1:22
  [Host] Which controls what?
• 1:23
  [Guest] Movement, cameras, microphone, collision detection. His own list: watch through its eyes, backdoor the models on board, and switch off the thing that stops ninety pounds of machine from walking into a kid.
• 1:37
  [Host] But who actually has one standing around?
• 1:41
  [Guest] Universities, robotics labs, warehouse floors. This is the education model, about twenty thousand dollars, already working in buildings full of people.
• 1:50
  [Host] One robot at a time, though.
• 1:52
  [Guest] His words: it is wormable. Once one G1 is compromised, it can spread the same exploit to the next G1 in range, and so on indefinitely.
• 2:04
  [Host] Then Unitree was negligent.
• 2:05
  [Guest] That is the easy read and it is wrong. They triaged fast, closed the cloud hole before he published, and paid the bounty. They had hardened this class of bug once already. He found a different door into the same house.
• 2:23
  [Host] Doesn't the import ban clear these out anyway?
• 2:27
  [Guest] Read the order. Models already authorized can still be imported, sold and used, and a Commission waiver keeps firmware updates flowing. Security patches included.
• 2:37
  [Host] So the rule isn't the problem. Patching is allowed.
• 2:41
  [Guest] Allowed, not required. Nobody must ship one, nobody must install one, and there is no recall path.
• 2:49
  [Host] At least the list names the Chinese makers.
• 2:52
  [Guest] It names none of them. The Commission wrote it country-neutral: what counts is where a device is produced, not who owns the company. An American firm building abroad is covered too.
• 3:06
  [Host] A rule about geography, pointed at a bug about permission.
• 3:10
  [Guest] A covered list asks where the thing was built. It never asks whether the thing checks who is talking to it, and a missing permission check is a bug any vendor in any country ships.
• 3:26
  [Host] And the border did nothing to the company either.
• 3:29
  [Guest] Bloomberg reported that the week before he published, Unitree listed in Shanghai and closed its first day up four hundred and sixty percent. The rule shapes one market. The firmware is global.
• 3:43
  [Host] Then who owns the robot already standing in the building?
• 3:48
  [Guest] Nobody, formally. The Commission's approval covers the radio, not whether the machine checks who it obeys. If a G1 is in your building, its firmware version is a facilities question this week, not an IT one.
• 4:04
  [Host] In Unscarcity, Patrick Deglon has a law called Freedom is Reciprocal, and he argues it with a factory dumping waste into a river. A machine a stranger can drive is the same river, and everyone in Bluetooth range is downstream.
• 4:21
  [Guest] For more on humanoid robots and what a border can and cannot regulate, head to unscarcity dot ai. The book is on Amazon, the audiobook is on Spotify. This has been Minds, Bodies, and Terawatts.