Did you know you can get a “smart bed” that tracks your sleep, breathing, heart rate, and even regulates the temperature of the mattress? No? Well, you can get root access to one, too, as [Dillan] shows, and if you’re lucky, find a phone-home backdoor-like connection. The backstory to this hack is pretty interesting, too!

You see, a Sleep Number bed requires a network connection for its smart features, with no local option offered. Not to worry — [Dillan] wrote a Homebridge plugin that’d talk the cloud API, so you could at least meaningfully work with the bed data. However, the plugin got popular, Sleep Number didn’t expect the API to be that popular. When they discovered the plugin, they asked that it be shut down. Tech-inclined customers are not to be discouraged, of course.

Taking a closer look at the hardware, [Dillan] found a UART connection and dumped the flash, then wrote an extensive tutorial on how to tap into your bed’s controller, which runs Linux, and add a service you can use locally to query bed data and control the bed – just like it should have been from the beginning. Aside from that, he’s found a way to connect this hub to a network without using Sleep Number’s tools, enabling fully featured third-party use – something that the company doesn’t seem to like. Another thing he’s found is a reverse SSH tunnel back into the Sleep Number network.

Now, it can be reasonable to have a phone-home tunnel, but that doesn’t mean you want it in your personal network, and it does expose a threat surface that might be exploited in the future, which is why you might want to know about it. Perhaps you’d like to use Bluetooth instead of WiFi. Having this local option is good for several reasons. For example, having your smart devices rely on the manufacturer’s server is a practice that regularly results in perma-bricked smart devices, though we’ve been seeing some examples of dedicated hackers bringing devices back to life. Thanks to this hack, once Sleep Number shutters, is bought out, or just wants to move on, their customers won’t be left with a suddenly dumbed-down bed they can no longer control.

[Header image courtesy of Sleep Number]