Executive brief
The Unitree G1 EDU is a high-end humanoid robot ($20,000+) used for education and research. A critical chain of three security flaws allows attackers within network range to gain root access and execute arbitrary code, potentially enabling full robot compromise, theft of proprietary data, or weaponization of the platform. The vulnerability is wormable—once one robot is compromised, it can automatically spread to others nearby without user interaction.
Technical details
CVE-2026-76639 chains three vulnerabilities: (1) an unauthenticated WebRTC-to-DDS bridge exposed on TCP port 9991 that accepts control messages without authentication, (2) a hardcoded static AES-128 encryption key stored with world-readable permissions, and (3) a path traversal flaw in the chat_go knowledge base upload API. An attacker with network adjacency can decrypt DDS traffic using the hardcoded key, publish messages to restart the bashrunner service, upload a malicious script via path traversal to the bashrunner execution directory, and trigger execution as root (uid 0) through the bashrunner shell subprocess. The vulnerability is adjacent-network in scope and requires no credentials or user interaction. Patches are available in firmware versions newer than 1.5.2.
Affected products
- Unitree G1 EDU through 1.5.2
Timeline
- 2026-08-27: disclosed
- other: Research published at boschko.ca/g1-ble-rce/ with complete technical breakdown and proof-of-concept code