CVE-2018-20785: Neatorobotics Botvac Connected Firmware

High severity, CVSS 7.4. EPSS: 0.5% chance of exploitation in the next 30 days.

Secure boot bypass and memory extraction can be achieved on Neato Botvac Connected 2.2.0 devices. During startup, the AM335x secure boot feature decrypts and executes firmware. Secure boot can be bypassed by starting with certain commands to the USB serial port. Although a power cycle occurs, this does not completely reset the chip: memory contents are still in place. Also, it restarts into a boot menu that enables XMODEM upload and execution of an unsigned QNX IFS system image, thereby completing the bypass of secure boot. Moreover, the attacker can craft custom IFS data and write it to unused memory to extract all memory contents that had previously been present. This includes the original firmware and sensitive information such as Wi-Fi credentials.

Affected products

Published 2019-02-23. Last modified 2026-06-17.