Experts from the EUROCOM engineering high school in France have discovered fundamental vulnerabilities in Bluetooth wireless data exchange technology that allow interception and decryption of information transmitted using this technology. The research was published in the official gazette Web site scientific institution.
The technique of such attacks is called BLÖF. As part of the experiment, EUROCOM experts developed six ways to access information transmitted via Bluetooth. Experiments have shown that at least three of these are effective.
According to the report’s authors, the identified vulnerabilities can be exploited in any hardware and software using Bluetooth versions 4.2 through 5.4; hence, it covers the range of devices released from late 2014 to February 2023. Billions of computers, smartphones and other equipment that use the Bluetooth protocol to exchange information could potentially be subject to BLuffS attacks. This was possible because critical vulnerabilities exist in the Bluetooth architecture itself.
BLuffS attacks are possible by exploiting four vulnerabilities in obtaining the session key, which is private information used to encrypt data transmitted between users.
An attacker can influence the process of generating an encryption key, make it insufficiently secure, and then select access to that key using the “brute force” method of enumerating possible variants of the security code. To do this, the hacker must be within Bluetooth range of both devices and appear to be one of the parties involved in the data exchange, EUROCOM said.
BLuffs allows you not only to access a data transfer session, but also to decrypt and hack previous communication sessions.
According to EUROCOM, the discovery of such vulnerabilities indicates the need to pay more attention to the security of communication sessions, agree on current and future Bluetooth security standards, as well as develop open source Bluetooth firmware.
Previous experts listed Stages of hacking data from industrial enterprises.