A flaw in the binding process of Govee’s cloud platform and devices allows a remote attacker to bind an existing, online Govee device to the attacker’s account, resulting in full control of the device and removal of the device from its legitimate owner’s account. The server‑side API allows device association using a set of identifiers: device, sku, type, and a client‑computed value, that are not cryptographically bound to a secret originating from the device itself.
The vulnerability has been verified for the Govee H6056 - lamp device in firmware version 1.08.13, but may affect also other Govee cloud‑connected devices. The vendor is not able to provide a list of affected products, but rolls out a firmware and server-side fixes. Devices that reached end‑of‑life for security support need replacement with newer models supporting updates.
The system’s authorization functionality does not prevent one user from gaining access to another user’s data or record by modifying the key value identifying the data.
Retrieval of a user record occurs in the system based on some key value that is under user control. The key would typically identify a user-related record stored in the system and would be used to lookup that record for presentation to the user. It is likely that an attacker would have to be an authenticated user in the system. However, the authorization process would not properly check the data access operation to ensure that the authenticated user performing the operation has sufficient entitlements to perform the requested data access, hence bypassing any other authorization checks present in the system. For example, attackers can look at places where user specific data is retrieved (e.g. search screens) and determine whether the key for the item being looked up is controllable externally. The key may be a hidden field in the HTML form field, might be passed as a URL parameter or as an unencrypted cookie variable, then in each of these cases it will be possible to tamper with the key value. One manifestation of this weakness is when a system uses sequential or otherwise easily-guessable session IDs that would allow one user to easily switch to another user’s session and read/modify their data.