Hacking the EOD Bot How I Learned to Love the Boomba

The speakers bought a surplus PackBot, a bomb disposal robot built on early 2000s engineering, and took it apart to see how it works. They start with its history, from a DARPA-funded design through several corporate owners, and walk through the hardware: a Linux single-board computer, a stack of five circuit layers, standardized accessory ports that carry 24 volts on some pins, and a rear maintenance port they mapped with a custom cable.

The software half covers how the robot is controlled. Operators log in over SSH with a shared default password, all processes run as root, and sessions are created over plain HTTP, so someone on the same network can release another operator's session. Video runs as multicast UDP. The team decoded the JAUS command protocol from the tablet app's APK to build a Wireshark dissector, and they found that the 4.9 GHz mesh radio's OpenVPN overlay was unencrypted. They replaced that radio with custom hardware and ran the tablet app on newer Android versions and a Steam Deck.

The closing section argues that a walled-garden perimeter is not enough and that protocols need protection too. Recommended steps include secure boot, dm-verity and encrypted filesystems, and retiring legacy platforms before technical debt piles up. The speakers also note that obscurity only delays analysis, and that coordinated disclosure with the vendor went smoothly.