Hacking the Meta Ray-Ban smartglasses
The gist
Vulnerability researcher Paula Pamoutaf ran her own app on Ray-Ban Meta glasses by bypassing Meta's signature checks.
The work shows the glasses' app protections could be sidestepped, not remote takeover.
How it unfolded
- Jul 2026Pamoutaf began examining a borrowed pair of Ray-Ban Meta glasses while checking Pwn2Own targets for 2026, and obtained arbitrary code execution.
- Jul 2026She extracted firmware via an OTA update by reversing the Meta AI app and hooking OTAArtifactInfo to print the CDN download URL, then fetched the full firmware by setting the GraphQL field device_firmware_full_update_only to true.
- Jul 2026Using Frida, she swapped the legitimate DAT APK for a self-signed app on firmware 126 and earlier, which did not verify Meta's signature, and ran it via Meta's Camera Access sample app.
Key terms
- Pwn2Own
- A computer hacking contest where contestants exploit widely used software and devices with previously unknown vulnerabilities.
- arbitrary code execution
- A security flaw letting an attacker run any commands or code of their choice on a target machine or process.
Source: Wikipedia