ESP32 vulnerabilities

The ESP32 SoC in the Meatmeet basestation lacks Secure Boot, which ensures only authenticated software can execute. Without a chain of trust during startup, an attacker with physical access can flash modified firmware and execute malicious code.

The ESP32 system on a chip (SoC) that powers the Meatmeet Pro was found to have JTAG enabled. By leaving JTAG enabled on an ESP32 in a commercial product an attacker with physical access to the device can connect over this port and reflash the device's firmware with malicious code which will be executed upon running. As a result, the victim will lose access to the functionality of their device and the attack may gain unauthorized access to the victim's Wi-Fi network by re-connecting to the SSID defined in the NVS partition of the device.

UART download mode remains enabled on the ESP32 chip running the firmware. An adversary can dump the device flash and retrieve sensitive information such as current and previous Wi-Fi network details from the NVS partition, and can also reflash the device with their own firmware containing malicious modifications.