Cybersecurity specialist Olivier Laflamme has published a detailed analysis of two exploit chains targeting the Unitree G1 humanoid robot. One of the identified vulnerabilities allowed an attacker to gain control over the device within Bluetooth signal range. The manufacturer, Unitree, officially confirmed the security issues and promptly released patches to address the identified flaws.
The researcher named the primary discovered vulnerability UniBLEed. This flaw allowed establishing a connection with the robot via Bluetooth without any user confirmation or password entry. In response to a specially crafted request, the device transmitted an encrypted service block containing an RSA-wrapped packet consisting of an AES-128 key, serial number, and Bluetooth address. As intended by the developers, decryption of this block was supposed to be performed exclusively by Unitree's cloud infrastructure. In practice, however, the service accepted this block and returned the decrypted data to any registered user without verifying whether the specific robot was associated with their account. As Laflamme noted, authentication was present in the system, but authorization mechanisms were absent.
The serial number of the G1 device could be obtained from the broadcast Bluetooth advertisement that the robot continuously transmitted, or via a separate unencrypted request. As a result, an attacker with a free Unitree account was able to recover the cryptographic key of a specific robot and gain access to its encrypted communication channel, including wireless network configuration commands. Further exploitation leveraged the wpa_connect.sh system script. When a Wi-Fi password of 121 bytes in length was transmitted, the robot switched to an insecure manual mode for processing network configurations, in which the transmitted data was written to the wpa_supplicant configuration file without proper filtering or escaping of special characters. In practice, this allowed an attacker to substitute network parameters in such a way that the G1 connected to an access point controlled by the attacker.
Once the robot was moved to the controlled network, the CVE-2026-76639 exploit chain was activated. The chat_go conversational AI service allowed the mobile application to send text notes to the robot's internal knowledge base. Instead of a regular note, path traversal could be used to write an arbitrary file to the directory of another system service, which upon restart would discover the planted file and add it to the list of permitted executables. The alternative chain CVE-2026-76640 began with a buffer overflow in the device's Bluetooth server itself. Laflamme sent the robot 1,050 excess bytes of data, which led to the overwriting of adjacent memory structures, forced termination of the main event processing loop, and substitution of a false cleanup entry. As a result, the process invoked a system command with root superuser privileges.
The researcher particularly emphasized that the identified attack chain was end-to-end in nature: after successfully compromising one G1 unit, the device could use a similar scenario to attack other robots within Bluetooth signal range. Laflamme successfully reproduced the exploitation of the vulnerabilities on multiple G1 model units, confirming the universality of the discovered methods. For conducting the research, the specialist received a bug bounty of five thousand dollars from the manufacturer. Earlier in August, Unitree demonstrated a humanoid robot codenamed "Superman," capable of moving at a speed of 12.66 meters per second and performing standing jumps to a height of two meters.