Security measures helpless against critical Xiaomi Redmi Buds vulnerability

The Korea Internet & Security Agency (KISA) has issued an urgent advisory following the discovery of critical security flaws in several generations of Xiaomi wireless earbuds. In a recent notice, the agency warned that because no official security patch is yet available, users should "disable Bluetooth in public places when not using earphones."

The flaws affect a wide range of Xiaomi’s "Pro" lineup of wireless earbuds, including the Redmi Buds 3 Pro, 4 Pro, 5 Pro, and 6 Pro. Although the 3 Pro and 4 Pro were released several years ago, these models remain staples of the secondary market, and the 5 Pro and 6 Pro are still actively sold through official global channels and major retailers in 2026.

Data sniffing and kill switch

The vulnerabilities, documented by the US CERT Coordination Center last month, allow an attacker within Bluetooth range to bypass all standard security hurdles. No pairing or authentication is required to exploit the devices.

The first flaw, CVE-2025-13834, is a Heartbleed-style information leak issue. When the earbuds' control channel receives a specific "TEST" command with a large length field but an empty payload, the device returns a buffer of uninitialized memory.

Researchers from Korea University, who discovered the bug, warned that an attacker can exploit this out-of-bounds read to steal up to 127 bytes of data, including the phone number of a user's active call peer, with a single malicious packet.

The second bug, CVE-2025-13328, acts as a remote kill switch. By flooding the device with a high volume of commands, an attacker can overwhelm the device's processing queue. This leads to a complete firmware crash that forcibly terminates paired user connections.

According to reports, Xiaomi has attributed the issues to a "nonstandard configuration of Google Fast Pair by some chip suppliers," and confirmed it is currently working on an over-the-air (OTA) update to fix the bug.

This incident mirrors a growing trend of “silent" exploits targeting Bluetooth devices. Previous investigations into Google’s Fast Pair protocol have similarly shown how unauthenticated protocols can be weaponized to hijack audio and even track users.

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