A critical vulnerability affecting millions of internet-connected Shark robot vacuums allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code, hijack onboard cameras, and take control of motors.
The flaw stems from misconfigured AWS IoT Core access policies and remains unpatched despite months of coordinated disclosure attempts with manufacturer SharkNinja.
The vulnerability was discovered through hardware-level analysis of two Shark models: the RV2320EDUS and AV1102ARUS.
Shark Vacuum RCE Vulnerability
Tokay0 identified exposed UART pins on the RV2320EDUS motherboard and gained root shell access by interrupting the U-Boot sequence with Ctrl-C, bypassing password authentication entirely.
From there, a writable debug script directory (/mnt/udisk/debug_sh_folder/) was leveraged to persist a custom SSH backdoor across reboots.
With root access established, analysis of running processes revealed appd, a device management daemon maintaining a persistent MQTT connection over WebSocket to an AWS IoT Core broker using mutual TLS.
Critically, the device’s certificate and private key permitted wildcard topic subscription ($aws/things/#), exposing traffic from every Shark device in the AWS region rather than just the researcher’s own unit.
Reverse engineering the appd binary in Ghidra uncovered an Exec_Command field processed via a shadow-update MQTT message. The function passes any string under 1,000 bytes directly to popen(), executing it as a shell command.
Because device certificates lacked proper publish restrictions, an attacker possessing any single device’s key could publish crafted Exec_Command payloads to arbitrary victim device topics using only the target’s serial number, which are trivially enumerable via the same wildcard subscription.
Tokay0 confirmed cross-device exploitation by purchasing a second vacuum (AV1102ARUS) and executing a wget-based reverse shell payload against it using credentials extracted from the first device, despite the differing hardware models.
A 24-hour MQTT monitoring session captured over 10.5 million messages across 1.5 million unique device serial numbers, with an estimated 673,816 devices (44%) confirmed vulnerable to remote command execution within a single AWS region.
Because regional certificate pinning restricts cross-region access, attackers would need to purchase region-specific devices to expand their reach, a low barrier given retail availability.
Beyond basic command execution, affected devices expose live camera feeds, motor/navigation controls, stored home floor plans, and plaintext Wi-Fi PSKs, turning a compromised vacuum into a mobile surveillance and network intrusion platform.
Tokay0 notified SharkNinja on March 1, 2026, with technical details to follow on March 11. Despite acknowledgment, SharkNinja’s responses over the following months amounted to “under review” status updates with no committed remediation date.
After the standard 90-day disclosure window lapsed in June, the researcher reserved a CVE identifier through MITRE’s CNA-LR program. SharkNinja promised a “confirmed completion date” by July 10, which never materialized, prompting public disclosure on July 13.
This isn’t an isolated case in the robot vacuum space. Similar IoT security failures have previously affected Ecovacs devices (remote audio/camera hijacking) and DJI ROMO units, where a researcher accidentally compromised roughly 7,000 vacuums using a PlayStation controller.
The vulnerability remains unpatched at the time of publication, with exploit scripts withheld pending remediation.
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