For Security, Bluethooth is often not good

For Security, Bluetooth is often not good

We had a great space Mashup this week, and our main conclusion is that satellites are at great risk of attack, and one of the key vectors is the usage of radio wave hacking (spoofing, hijacking, tapping, man-in-the-middle, and so on). We thus really need to start to understand how vulnerable our radio networks are, as an attack could bring down our critical infrastructure.

Bluetooth in cars

Over the next few months, we’re going to be presenting on a wide range of wi-fi vulnerabilities, and show how many the underlying methods are. One of the key targets is Bluetooth, and which really has fundamental problems. And so this week we published a paper on Bluetooth security weaknesses within cars [here]:

The work was carried out with a range of devices and looked at the security of the Bluetooth devices within a car. Overall the setup was:

And here is the monitoring station with its two Ubertooth devices:

Overall the success rate in capturing and decrypting Bluetooth data stream was extremely high in the case of where there was channel saturation:

SweynTooth

A new BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) vulnerability, too, was announced this week and named SweynTooth. It was discovered by researchers at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), and affects quite a few chip vendors (Texas Instruments, NXP, Cypress, Dialog Semiconductors, Microchip, STMicroelectronics, and Telink Semiconductor), and which are used in, at least, 480 end-user products. Overall they found 12 vulnerabilities with the SDK libraries for these chips [here]:

The 12 vulnerabilities have been given a CVE number, and fit into the classifications of: crash (to bring the device down); deadlock (to stop processes); and security bypass (the reduce the security restrictions):

An example of crashing a Fitbit Insipre is shown here:

and wifi-enabled plug sockets:

Conclusions

For the next few months, we will be gathering together demos on some of the key vulnerabilities related to wifi, so watch this space for announcements.