Reverse engineering my cloud-connected e-scooter and finding the master key to unlock all scooters

A few years ago, I decided to buy an electric scooter for commuting in the city. I had already been using rental scooters for a while, but got tired of having to "hunt" for one or realizing there isn't one near my apartment building when I wanted to go to work in the morning.

I decided to go with an Äike T. This wasn't because it was necessarily better than the competitors' products. In fact, the scooter was fairly expensive, and at that price point, there were certainly scooters on the market that were technically superior.

However, I went with the Äike because it was a local product and I like to support local companies whenever possible. Äike (meaning "lightning" in Estonian) was designed and manufactured in Estonia, right here in Tallinn. From what I could tell, they also didn't use many off-the-shelf components. The design was fully custom, the IoT module used in the scooter was also locally produced, they had their own battery pack, and so on. This isn't necessarily a good thing because it hurts the maintainability of the scooter, but I found their product ambitious.

Another reason was that they had a sister company Tuul (meaning "wind" in Estonian) which offered rental scooters. These scooters were also just Äike scooters, and out of all of the competitors, I enjoyed the ride that Tuul/Äike offered the most and used their rental service whenever possible.

Äike went bankrupt last year. While this is unfortunate as in the long term, it'll become increasingly harder to source replacement components due to all of them being custom, I started having much more immediate concerns regarding the usability of my scooter. The scooter does not have a manual start-stop function. Starting and stopping, unlocking the battery tray, setting it into transport mode, etc is all done via their app.