Severin von Wnuck-Lipinski Hacks Miele's Infrared Diagnostic System, Releases FreeMDU

Electrical engineer Severin von Wnuck-Lipinski has announced the release of a suite of tools designed to decode the hidden messages blasted out from the status LEDs of Miele appliances — and will be presenting the project at 39th Chaos Communication Congress, in a talk on "hacking washing machines."

"FreeMDU provides open hardware and software tools for communicating with Miele appliances via their optical diagnostic interface," von Wnuck-Lipinski explains of the project. "It serves as a free and open alternative to the proprietary Miele Diagnostic Utility (MDU) software, which is only available to registered service technicians."

Anyone who has tried to diagnose a fault with an electronic device will be familiar with the search for a serial port or debug interface, but Miele takes an interesting approach: since 1996 the company has included with most of its devices an externally-accessible debug interface dubbed "Program Correction," accessed via infrared signals aimed at what appears at first glance to be a simple status LED.

"Until now, communication with this interface required an expensive infrared adapter sold exclusively by Miele, along with their closed-source software," von Wnuck-Lipinski says. "The goal of FreeMDU is to make this interface accessible to everyone for diagnostic and home automation purposes."

In theory, FreeMDU allows for the same access as Miele's in-house hardware — including reading of diagnostic reports and reprogramming of internal settings. As a reverse engineered project, though, there's a catch: it presently has only been confirmed to work with a subset of MDU-compatible devices, and is described by its creator as "highly experimental" and capable of causing "permanent damage to your Miele devices if not used responsibly."

For those not put off by the warning, the project's source code is available on GitHub under the permissive Apache 2.0 and MIT licenses; those who want more information first are advised to tune in to von Wnuck-Lipinski's talk at the 39th Chaos Communication Congress in December.

Main article image courtesy of Miele.