Btlejacking Attack Could Allow a Hacker to Jam and Takeover the Bluetooth Connection

The Btlejacking Attack allows taking control over any Bluetooth Low Energy device, the attack abuses supervision timeout between two connected devices. The supervision timeout defines the time after which the connection is if no valid packets have been received.

Security researcher Damien Cauquil reveal the attack on Aug. 11 Defcon hacker conference and also he published as open-source tool BtleJack that enables you to sniff, jam and hijack Bluetooth Low Energy devices.

Want to discover some BLE voodoo tool and a new vuln impacting all versions (4.x and 5) ? I'll give all the details and demo this in Track 2 at 1200 🙂 #DEFCON26

— Damien Cauquil (@virtualabs@mamot.fr) (@virtualabs) August 11, 2018

The Bluetooth jamming vulnerability can be tracked as CVE-2018-7252 and it affects the Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE) versions 4.0, 4.1, 4.2 and 5. In order to exploit the vulnerability, the attacker should be struck within 5 meters.

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BtleJack Tool take-over Btlejacking

BtleJack not only provides an affordable and reliable way to sniff and analyze Bluetooth Low Energy devices and their protocol stacks but also implements a brand new attack dubbed “BtleJacking” Damien said.

The BtleJack Tool is capable of sniffing, jamming and hijacking Bluetooth Low Energy devices. All you need is to have a Micro: BIT embedded device worth $15 that created by BBC.

Btlejack Tool Usage

• Sniff an existing BLE connection.
• Sniff new BLE connections.
• Jam an existing BLE connection.
• Hijack an existing BLE connection (btlejacking).
• Export captured packets to various PCAP formats.

Btlejacking attack poses a serious risk such as Unauthorized access to the device, Bypass authentication and Keep the device internal state intact which may lead to the data leak.

Starting from Bluetooth v4.2 BLE connections are secure it uses Elliptic Curve Diffie Hellman (ECDH) for key generation. “BLE hijacking is real and should be considered in your threat model,” Damien said.

“To avoid Btlejacking attacks BLE Secure Connections can include code injection protection with authentication code added to all packets that avoid Btlejacking attacks,” Damien said.

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