An anonymous reader quotes Motherboard’s post: In July, a video of a robot dog with a machine gun strapped to its back scared the internet. Now a hacker posting on Twitter as KF@d0tslash and GitHub as MAVProxyUser has discovered that the robot dog contains a switch and can be accessed via a tiny, portable hacking device. “Good news!” d0tslash said on Twitter. “Remember that robot dog you saw with a gun!? It was made by @UnitreeRobotic. Looks like all you need to throw it in the dirt is @flipper_zero. PDB has a backdoor at 433 MHz”.
In the video, d0tslash showed one of Unitree’s robot dogs connected to a power source. In the shot comes a hand holding Flipper Zero, a multi-functional Tamagotchi-like hacking device that can send and receive wireless signals via RFID, Bluetooth, NFC and other bands. A button is pressed on Flipper and the robot dog grabs and falls to the ground. Motherboard reached out to d0tslash to find out how they hacked the robot dog. The video power supply is an external source. “Literally a 24v external power supply so I’m not constantly charging the battery while developing,” said d0tslash.
d0tslash picked up one of the dogs and started going through the documentation when they found something interesting. Each dog comes with a remote switch attached to the power distribution board, the part of the machine that directs power from the battery to the various systems. The switch listens for a specific signal at 433 MHz. When it hears the signal, it turns off the robot. Some Unitree robot dogs even come with wireless remote control which stops the dog instantly. d0tslash then used Flipper Zero to emulate a blackout by copying the robot dog’s signal remotely transmitting at 433MHz. Thanks to work d0tslash shared on Github, anyone with a Flipper Zero or similar device can turn off these robot dogs.
