Bluetooth | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

A critical Bluetooth security flaw could be exploited by threat actors to take control of Android, Linux, macOS and iOS devices. Tracked as  CVE-2023-45866 , the issue relates to a case of authentication bypass that enables attackers to connect to susceptible devices and inject keystrokes to achieve code execution as the victim. "Multiple Bluetooth stacks have authentication bypass vulnerabilities that permit an attacker to connect to a discoverable host without user confirmation and inject keystrokes," said security researcher  Marc Newlin , who  disclosed  the flaws to the software vendors in August 2023. Specifically, the attack deceives the target device into thinking that it's connected to a Bluetooth keyboard by taking advantage of an "unauthenticated pairing mechanism" that's defined in the Bluetooth specification. Successful exploitation of the flaw could permit an adversary in close physical proximity to connect to a vulnerable device and trans

New research has unearthed multiple novel attacks that break Bluetooth Classic's forward secrecy and future secrecy guarantees, resulting in adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) scenarios between two already connected peers. The issues, collectively named  BLUFFS , impact Bluetooth Core Specification 4.2 through 5.4. They are tracked under the identifier  CVE-2023-24023  (CVSS score: 6.8) and were responsibly disclosed in October 2022. The attacks "enable device impersonation and machine-in-the-middle across sessions by only compromising one session key," EURECOM researcher Daniele Antonioli said in a study published late last month. This is made possible by leveraging two new flaws in the Bluetooth standard's session key derivation mechanism that allow the derivation of the same key across sessions. While forward secrecy in key-agreement cryptographic protocols ensures that past communications are not revealed, even if the private keys to a particular exchange are re

The introduction of Open AI's ChatGPT was a defining moment for the software industry, touching off a GenAI race with its November 2022 release. SaaS vendors are now rushing to upgrade tools with enhanced productivity capabilities that are driven by generative AI. Among a wide range of uses, GenAI tools make it easier for developers to build software, assist sales teams in mundane email writing, help marketers produce unique content at low cost, and enable teams and creatives to brainstorm new ideas.  Recent significant GenAI product launches include Microsoft 365 Copilot, GitHub Copilot, and Salesforce Einstein GPT. Notably, these GenAI tools from leading SaaS providers are paid enhancements, a clear sign that no SaaS provider will want to miss out on cashing in on the GenAI transformation. Google will soon launch its SGE "Search Generative Experience" platform for premium AI-generated summaries rather than a list of websites.  At this pace, it's just a matter of a short time befo

Apple and Google have  teamed up  to work on a  draft industry-wide specification  that's designed to tackle safety risks and alert users when they are being tracked without their knowledge or permission using devices like AirTags. "The first-of-its-kind specification will allow Bluetooth location-tracking devices to be compatible with unauthorized tracking detection and alerts across Android and iOS platforms," the companies said in a joint statement. While these trackers are primarily designed to keep tabs on personal belongings like keys, wallets, luggage, and other items, such devices have also been abused by bad actors for  criminal or nefarious purposes , including instances of  stalking, harassment, and theft . The goal is to standardize the alerting mechanisms and minimize opportunities for misuse across Bluetooth location-tracking devices from different vendors. To that end, Samsung, Tile, Chipolo, eufy Security, and Pebblebee have all come on board. In doi

A now-patched security flaw in Apple's iOS and macOS operating systems could have potentially enabled apps with Bluetooth access to eavesdrop on conversations with Siri. Apple said "an app may be able to record audio using a pair of connected AirPods," adding it addressed the Core Bluetooth issue in iOS 16.1 with improved entitlements. Credited with discovering and reporting the bug in August 2022 is app developer Guilherme Rambo. The bug, dubbed  SiriSpy , has been assigned the identifier CVE-2022-32946. "Any app with access to Bluetooth could record your conversations with Siri and audio from the iOS keyboard dictation feature when using AirPods or Beats headsets," Rambo  said  in a write-up. "This would happen without the app requesting microphone access permission and without the app leaving any trace that it was listening to the microphone." The vulnerability, according to Rambo, relates to a service called DoAP that's included in AirPo

A new research undertaken by a group of academics from the University of California San Diego has revealed for the first time that Bluetooth signals can be fingerprinted to track smartphones (and therefore, individuals). The identification, at its core, hinges on imperfections in the Bluetooth chipset hardware introduced during the manufacturing process, resulting in a "unique physical-layer fingerprint." "To perform a physical-layer fingerprinting attack, the attacker must be equipped with a Software Defined Radio sniffer: a radio receiver capable of recording raw IQ radio signals," the researchers  said  in a  new paper   titled  "Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices." The  attack  is made possible due to the ubiquitous nature of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons that are continuously transmitted by modern devices to enable crucial functions such as  contact tracing  during public health emergencies. The hardwa

A novel Bluetooth relay attack can let cybercriminals more easily than ever remotely  unlock and operate cars ,  break open residential smart locks , and breach secure areas. The vulnerability has to do with weaknesses in the current implementation of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), a wireless technology used for authenticating Bluetooth devices that are physically located within a close range. "An attacker can falsely indicate the proximity of Bluetooth LE (BLE) devices to one another through the use of a relay attack," U.K.-based cybersecurity company NCC Group  said . "This may enable unauthorized access to devices in BLE-based proximity authentication systems." Relay attacks , also called two-thief attacks, are a variation of person-in-the-middle attacks in which an adversary intercepts communication between two parties, one of whom is also an attacker, and then relays it to the target device without any manipulation. While various mitigations have been implem

Cybersecurity researchers have demonstrated a new attack technique that makes it possible to leverage a device's Bluetooth component to directly extract network passwords and manipulate traffic on a Wi-Fi chip, putting billions of electronic devices at risk of stealthy attacks. The novel attacks work against the so-called "combo chips," which are specialized chips that are equipped to handle different types of radio wave-based wireless communications, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and LTE. "We provide empirical evidence that coexistence, i.e., the coordination of cross-technology wireless transmissions, is an unexplored attack surface," a group of researchers from the Technical University of Darmstadt's Secure Mobile Networking Lab and the University of Brescia said in a  new paper . "Instead of escalating directly into the mobile [operating system], wireless chips can escalate their privileges into other wireless chips by exploiting the same mechanisms

A set of new security vulnerabilities has been disclosed in commercial Bluetooth stacks that could enable an adversary to execute arbitrary code and, worse, crash the devices via denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.  Collectively dubbed " BrakTooth " (referring to the Norwegian word "Brak" which translates to "crash"), the 16 security weaknesses span across 13 Bluetooth chipsets from 11 vendors such as Intel, Qualcomm, Zhuhai Jieli Technology, and Texas Instruments, covering an estimated 1,400 or more commercial products, including laptops, smartphones, programmable logic controllers, and IoT devices. The flaws were disclosed by researchers from the ASSET (Automated Systems SEcuriTy) Research Group at the Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). "All the vulnerabilities […] can be triggered without any previous pairing or authentication," the researchers noted. "The impact of our discovered vulnerabilities is categorized into

A group of academics has proposed a machine learning approach that uses authentic interactions between devices in Bluetooth networks as a foundation to handle device-to-device authentication reliably. Called " Verification of Interaction Authenticity " (aka VIA), the recurring authentication scheme aims to solve the problem of passive, continuous authentication and automatic deauthentication once two devices are paired with one another, which remain authenticated until an explicit deauthentication action is taken, or the authenticated session expires. "Consider devices that pair via Bluetooth, which commonly follow the pattern of pair once, trust indefinitely. After two devices connect, those devices are bonded until a user explicitly removes the bond. This bond is likely to remain intact as long as the devices exist, or until they transfer ownership," Travis Peters, one of the co-authors of the study,  said . "The increased adoption of (Bluetooth-enabled)

Adversaries could exploit newly discovered security weaknesses in Bluetooth Core and Mesh Profile Specifications to masquerade as legitimate devices and carry out man-in-the-middle (MitM) attacks. "Devices supporting the Bluetooth  Core  and  Mesh Specifications  are vulnerable to impersonation attacks and AuthValue disclosure that could allow an attacker to impersonate a legitimate device during pairing," the Carnegie Mellon CERT Coordination Center  said  in an advisory published Monday. The two Bluetooth specifications define the standard that allows for many-to-many communication over the short-range wireless technology to facilitate data transfer between devices in an ad-hoc network. The Bluetooth Impersonation AttackS, aka BIAS , enable a malicious actor to establish a secure connection with a victim, without having to know and authenticate the long-term key shared between the victims, thus effectively bypassing Bluetooth's authentication mechanism. "The

Latest research has demonstrated a new exploit that enables arbitrary data to be uploaded from devices that are not connected to the Internet by simply sending "Find My" Bluetooth broadcasts to nearby Apple devices. "It's possible to upload arbitrary data from non-internet-connected devices by sending Find My [Bluetooth Low Energy] broadcasts to nearby Apple devices that then upload the data for you," Positive Security researcher Fabian Bräunlein  said  in a technical write-up disclosed last week. The study builds on a previous analysis by TU Darmstadt  published  in March 2021, which disclosed two distinct design and implementation flaws in Apple's crowdsourced Bluetooth location tracking system that could lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to a user's location history of the past seven days. The investigation was augmented by the release of a framework called  OpenHaystack  that's designed to let any user create an &

Cybersecurity researchers on Thursday disclosed two distinct design and implementation flaws in Apple's crowdsourced Bluetooth location tracking system that can lead to a location correlation attack and unauthorized access to the location history of the past seven days, thereby deanonymizing users. The  findings  are a consequence of an exhaustive review undertaken by the Open Wireless Link (OWL) project, a team of researchers from the Secure Mobile Networking Lab at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany, who have historically taken apart Apple's wireless ecosystem with the goal of identifying security and privacy issues. In response to the disclosures on July 2, 2020, Apple is said to have partially addressed the issues, stated the researchers, who used their own data for the study citing privacy implications of the analysis. How Find My Works? Apple devices come with a feature called  Find My  that makes it easy for users to locate other Apple devices, including

Google security researchers are warning of a new set of zero-click vulnerabilities in the Linux Bluetooth software stack that can allow a nearby unauthenticated, remote attacker to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges on vulnerable devices. According to security engineer  Andy Nguyen , the three flaws — collectively called BleedingTooth — reside in the open-source  BlueZ  protocol stack that offers support for many of the core Bluetooth layers and protocols for Linux-based systems such as laptops and IoT devices. The first and the most severe is a heap-based type confusion ( CVE-2020-12351 , CVSS score 8.3) affecting Linux kernel 4.8 and higher and is present in the Logical Link Control and Adaptation Protocol ( L2CAP ) of the Bluetooth standard, which provides multiplexing of data between different higher layer protocols. "A remote attacker in short distance knowing the victim's [Bluetooth device] address can send a malicious l2cap packet and cause denial of se