{"id":20632,"date":"2018-01-04T10:30:33","date_gmt":"2018-01-04T15:30:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/?p=20632"},"modified":"2019-11-15T06:42:38","modified_gmt":"2019-11-15T11:42:38","slug":"xiaomi-mi-robot-hacked","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kaspersky.com\/blog\/xiaomi-mi-robot-hacked\/20632\/","title":{"rendered":"Xiaomi Mi Robot vacuum cleaner hacked"},"content":{"rendered":"

The story of the Internet and its Things<\/a> may seem as star-crossed a tale as any, but it does not need to be hopeless. Although security researchers Dennis Giese and Daniel Wegemer eventually managed to hack into the Xiaomi Mi Robot vacuum cleaner, their research shows that the device is much more secure than most other smart things are.<\/p>\n

In their talk at Chaos Communication Congress 34, which was held in Leipzig recently, the researchers explained how the device\u2019s software works and which vulnerabilities they had to use to finally crack its protection.<\/p>\n

Hacking the Mi Robot with tinfoil<\/h2>\n

When they started their research, Giese and Wegemer were amazed to find that the Xiaomi vacuum cleaner has more powerful hardware than many smartphones do: It is equipped with three<\/em> ARM processors, one of which is quad core. Sounds pretty promising, right? So, for starters, Giese and Wegemer tried to use several obvious attack vectors to hack the system.<\/p>\n

First, they examined a unit to see if there was a way in through the vacuum cleaner\u2019s micro USB port. That was a dead end: Xiaomi has secured this connection with some kind of authentication. After that, the researchers took the Mi Robot apart and tried to find a serial port on its motherboard. This attempt was likewise unsuccessful.<\/p>\n

Their second hacking method was network based. The researchers tried to scan the device\u2019s network ports, but all ports were closed. Sniffing network traffic didn\u2019t help, either; the robot\u2019s communications were encrypted. At this point, I\u2019m already rather impressed: Most other IoT devices would have been hacked by now because their creators usually don\u2019t go this far in terms of security. Our recent research on how insecure connected devices are<\/a> illustrates it perfectly.<\/p>\n

However, let\u2019s get back to the Xiaomi Mi Robot. The researchers\u2019 next attempt was to attack the vacuum cleaner\u2019s hardware. Here, they finally succeeded \u2014 by using aluminum foil to short-circuit some of the tiny contacts connecting processor to motherboard, causing the processor to enter a special mode that allows reading and even writing to flash memory directly through the USB connection.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s how Giese and Wegemer managed to obtain Mi Robot firmware, reverse-engineer it, and, eventually, modify and upload it to the vacuum cleaner, thereby gaining full control over the unit.<\/p>\n