InternalBlue - Bluetooth Binary Patching and Experimentation Framework

Bluetooth is one of the most established technologies for short range digital wireless data transmission. With the advent of wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), Bluetooth has again gained importance, which makes security research and protocol optimizations imperative. Surprisingly, there is a lack of openly available tools and experimental platforms to scrutinize Bluetooth. In particular, system aspects and close to hardware protocol layers are mostly uncovered. We reverse engineer multiple Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets that are widespread in off-the-shelf devices. Thus, we offer deep insights into the internal architecture of a popular commercial family of Bluetooth controllers used in smartphones, wearables, and IoT platforms. Reverse engineered functions can then be altered with our InternalBlue Python framework---outperforming evaluation kits, which are limited to documented and vendor-defined functions. The modified Bluetooth stack remains fully functional and high-performance. Hence, it provides a portable low-cost research platform. InternalBlue is a versatile framework and we demonstrate its abilities by implementing tests and demos for known Bluetooth vulnerabilities. Moreover, we discover a novel critical security issue affecting a large selection of Broadcom chipsets that allows executing code within the attacked Bluetooth firmware. We further show how to use our framework to fix bugs in chipsets out of vendor support and how to add new security features to Bluetooth firmware

Reactions of Low-Income African American Women to Breastfeeding Peer Counselors

Objective To examine the influence of breastfeeding peer counseling on the breastfeeding experiences of African American mothers who participated in the Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC). Design Qualitative study using focus groups. Setting Two WIC clinics in Southeast Wisconsin were used for recruitment and data collection. Participants A convenience sample of nine African American mothers participated in one of two focus groups. Methods The women responded to a series of open-ended questions about their breastfeeding experiences and the effect of breastfeeding peer counselors (BPCs). Content and thematic analyses were used to analyze patterns related to the influence of BPCs on breastfeeding. Results Four themes were categorized: Educating With Truth, Validating for Confidence, Countering Others\u27 Negativity, and Supporting With Solutions. Mothers in this study expressed positive reactions to educational, emotional, and social support from BPCs. The mothers noted that the contact they had with BPCs had a direct positive influence on their breastfeeding experiences. However, the contact from BPCs varied between the two WIC clinics. Conclusion The findings demonstrate the positive effects of BPCs on breastfeeding experiences among African American WIC participants. Findings from this study can guide future explorations using BPCs. Interventions are needed to develop standardized guidelines to bring about homogeneity of, better access to, and greater use of BPCs

Inside Job: Diagnosing Bluetooth Lower Layers Using Off-the-Shelf Devices

Bluetooth is among the dominant standards for wireless short-range communication with multi-billion Bluetooth devices shipped each year. Basic Bluetooth analysis inside consumer hardware such as smartphones can be accomplished observing the Host Controller Interface (HCI) between the operating system's driver and the Bluetooth chip. However, the HCI does not provide insights to tasks running inside a Bluetooth chip or Link Layer (LL) packets exchanged over the air. As of today, consumer hardware internal behavior can only be observed with external, and often expensive tools, that need to be present during initial device pairing. In this paper, we leverage standard smartphones for on-device Bluetooth analysis and reverse engineer a diagnostic protocol that resides inside Broadcom chips. Diagnostic features include sniffing lower layers such as LL for Classic Bluetooth and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), transmission and reception statistics, test mode, and memory peek and poke

A New Information Hiding Method Based on Improved BPCS Steganography

Bit-plane complexity segmentation (BPCS) steganography is advantageous in its capacity and imperceptibility. The important step of BPCS steganography is how to locate noisy regions in a cover image exactly. The regular method, black-and-white border complexity, is a simple and easy way, but it is not always useful, especially for periodical patterns. Run-length irregularity and border noisiness are introduced in this paper to work out this problem. Canonical Cray coding (CGC) is also used to replace pure binary coding (PBC), because CGC makes use of characteristic of human vision system. Conjugation operation is applied to convert simple blocks into complex ones. In order to contradict BPCS steganalysis, improved BPCS steganography algorithm adopted different bit-planes with different complexity. The higher the bit-plane is, the smaller the complexity is. It is proven that the improved BPCS steganography is superior to BPCS steganography by experiment

The Swap Matching Problem Revisited

In this paper, we revisit the much studied problem of Pattern Matching with Swaps (Swap Matching problem, for short). We first present a graph-theoretic model, which opens a new and so far unexplored avenue to solve the problem. Then, using the model, we devise two efficient algorithms to solve the swap matching problem. The resulting algorithms are adaptations of the classic shift-and algorithm. For patterns having length similar to the word-size of the target machine, both the algorithms run in linear time considering a fixed alphabet.Comment: 23 pages, 3 Figures and 17 Table

bta-miR-23a Regulates the Myogenic Differentiation of Fetal Bovine Skeletal Muscle-Derived Progenitor Cells by Targeting MDFIC Gene

miR-23a, a member of the miR-23a/24-2/27a cluster, has been demonstrated to play pivotal roles in many cellular activities. However, the mechanisms of how bta-miR-23a controls the myogenic differentiation (MD) of PDGFRalpha(-) bovine progenitor cells (bPCs) remain poorly understood. In the present work, bta-miR-23a expression was increased during the MD of (PDGFRalpha-) bPCs. Moreover, bta-miR-23a overexpression significantly promoted the MD of (PDGFRalpha-) bPCs. Luciferase reporter assays showed that the 3\u27-UTR region of MDFIC (MyoD family inhibitor domain containing) could be a promising target of bta-miR-23a, which resulted in its post-transcriptional down-regulation. Additionally, the knockdown of MDFIC by siRNA facilitated the MD of (PDGFRalpha-) bPCs, while the overexpression of MDFIC inhibited the activating effect of bta-miR-23a during MD. Of note, MDFIC might function through the interaction between MyoG transcription factor and MEF2C promoter. This study reveals that bta-miR-23a can promote the MD of (PDGFRalpha-) bPCs through post-transcriptional downregulation of MDFIC

The potential of neural progenitor cells: an investigation into their fate in vitro and after transplantation

Neuronal loss within the central nervous system (CNS) has been considered an irreversible process, as cells within the mammalian CNS fail to regenerate after degeneration and trauma. Neural stem (and progenitor) cells have been proposed as a potential source of new neurons. This investigation describes the fate of neural progenitor cells both in vitro and after transplantation. Progenitor cells were isolated from the brains of neonatal green fluorescent protein (GFP) expressing mice thereby allowing cells to be easily visualized both in culture and after transplantation. We have shown brain-derived progenitor cells (BPCs) can be maintained in defined conditions and are capable of neurogenesis and gliogenesis. Cells adopted characteristic morphologies and phenotypes of both neurons and glia as determined by immunocytochemistry. To determine the potential of BPCs to undergo neurogenesis and specifically retinogenesis we adopted three approaches: (1) transplantation, (2) coculture and (3) induction/treatment with a developmental cue. We have shown brain progenitor cells can incorporate into the developing retina and adopt characteristic morphologies and phenotypes. Furthermore, using immunocytochemistry we show BPCs expressed proteins typical of surrounding retinal neurons. We further analyzed the potential of BPCs to adopt retinal fates using P1 mouse retina in a coculture system with BPCs. When cocultured with P1 retina but not P7 retina BPCs expressed rhodopsin a protein restricted to photoreceptors. Furthermore, rhodopsin expression was induced by a soluble factor and not cell-contact mediated. BPCs have been shown to adopt neuronal fates, yet not synaptic structures. Using cholesterol as a potential differentiation cue and developmental factor we treated BPCs and analyzed their fates in vitro. Cholesterol induced dramatic morphological differentiation and pre and post synaptic protein expression among BPCs. This investigation provides the first description of brain-derived cells undergoing retinalization and illustrates the most dramatic integration of stem/progenitor cells within the CNS. The ability to produce \u27neurons\u27 from neural progenitor cells both in vitro and in vivo has tremendous implications for treating numerous conditions