Gotta blame China to get upvoted on Lemmy.

Someone correct me if i’m wrong, but it looks like it’s not the big deal the original blog post makes it out to be.

To issue those undocumented HCI commands one either needs to hijack a computer/soc/mcu that is connected to an esp32 with HCI UART transport enabled or put malicious software on the esp itself.

The mac spoofing might be interesting for people building hacking tool, however.

While I have a few ESP32 in my collection, I am now happy that I chose a different platform for my project.

I wonder what people will say in Nürnberg next week at Embedded World.

Computers are what we’d get if Epimetheus stole something from the gods for us instead

Armed with this new tool, which enables raw access to Bluetooth traffic, Targolic discovered hidden vendor-specific commands (Opcode 0x3F) in the ESP32 Bluetooth firmware that allow low-level control over Bluetooth functions.

In total, they found 29 undocumented commands, collectively characterized as a “backdoor,” that could be used for memory manipulation (read/write RAM and Flash), MAC address spoofing (device impersonation), and LMP/LLCP packet injection.

Espressif has not publicly documented these commands, so either they weren’t meant to be accessible, or they were left in by mistake.

I’d kind of like to know whether these can be used against an unpaired device or not. That’d seem to have a pretty dramatic impact on the scope of the vulnerability.

At rough count I have 16 of those buggers. Appliances, switches, load meters, lights, etc. If I look harder, I’d probably find more. Yikes!

The ESP32 chip is used in tons of devices. The scope of this is really broad.