A comprehensive review of RFID and bluetooth security: practical analysis

The Internet of Things (IoT) provides the ability to digitize physical objects into virtual data, thanks to the integration of hardware (e.g., sensors, actuators) and network communications for collecting and exchanging data. In this digitization process, however, security challenges need to be taken into account in order to prevent information availability, integrity, and confidentiality from being compromised. In this paper, security challenges of two broadly used technologies, RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and Bluetooth, are analyzed. First, a review of the main vulnerabilities, security risk, and threats affecting both technologies are carried out. Then, open hardware and open source tools like: Proxmark3 and Ubertooth as well as BtleJuice and Bleah are used as part of the practical analysis. Lastly, risk mitigation and counter measures are proposed

Analyzing the secure simple pairing in Bluetooth v4.0

This paper analyzes the security of Bluetooth v4.0’s Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) protocol, for both the Bluetooth Basic Rate / Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) and Bluetooth Low Energy (LE) operational modes. Bluetooth v4.0 is the latest version of a wireless communication standard for low-speed and low-range data transfer among devices in a human’s PAN. It allows increased network mobility among devices such as headsets, PDAs, wireless keyboards and mice. A pairing process is initiated when two devices desire to communicate, and this pairing needs to correctly authenticate devices so that a secret link key is established for secure communication. What is interesting is that device authentication relies on humans to communicate verification information between devices via a human-aided out-of-band channel. Bluetooth v4.0’s SSP protocol is designed to offer security against passive eavesdropping and man-inthe- middle (MitM) attacks. We conduct the first known detailed analysis of SSP for all its MitM-secure models. We highlight some issues related to exchange of public keys and use of the passkey in its models and discuss how to treat them properly

Man-in-the-Middle Attack and its Countermeasure in Bluetooth Secure Simple Pairing

With the development of more types of devices which have Bluetooth as a primary option to communicate, the importance of secure communication is growing. Bluetooth provides a short range wireless communication between devices making convenient for users and thus eliminating the need for messy cables. The proliferation of the Bluetooth devices in the workplace exposes organizations to security risks. Bluetooth technology and associated devices are susceptible to general wireless networking threats, such as denial of service attack, eavesdropping, man-in-the-middle attacks, message modification, and resource misappropriation. Preventing unauthorized users from secure communication is a challenge to the pairing process. The Man-in-the-Middle attack is based on sending random signals to jam the physical layer of legitimate user and then by falsification of information sent during the input/output capabilities exchange; also the fact that the security of the protocol is likely to be limited by the capabilities of the least powerful or the least secure device type. In addition, proposed a countermeasure that render the attack impractical. We have shown that, the proposed method can withstand the MITM attack and achieving all the security needs like authenticity, confidentiality, integrity and availability as well as it is an improvement to the existing Bluetooth secure simple pairing in order to make it more secure

Enhancement of bluetooth security authentication using hash-based message authentication code (HMAC) algorithm

Recently, Bluetooth technology is widely used by organizations and individuals to provide wireless personal area network (WPAN). This is because the radio frequency (RF) waves can easily penetrate obstacles and can propagate without direct line-of-sight (LoS). These two characteristics have led to replace wired communication by wireless systems. However, there are serious security challenges associated with wireless communication systems because they are easier to eavesdrop, disrupt and jam than the wired systems. Bluetooth technology started with a form of pairing called legacy pairing prior to any communication. However, due to the serious security issues found in the legacy pairing, a secure and simple pairing called SPP was announced with Bluetooth 2.1 and later since 2007. SPP has solved the main security issue which is the weaknesses of the PIN code in the legacy pairing, however it has been found with some vulnerabilities such as eavesdropping and man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks. Since the discovery of these vulnerabilities, some enhancements have been proposed to the Bluetooth Specification Interest Group (SIG) which is the regulatory body of Bluetooth technology; nevertheless, some proposed enhancements are ineffective or are not yet implemented by Manufacturers. Therefore, an improvement of the security authentication in Bluetooth connection is highly required to overcome the existing drawbacks. This proposed protocol uses Hash-based Message Authentication Code (HMAC) algorithm with Secure Hash Algorithm (SHA-256). The implementation of this proposal is based on the Arduino Integrated Development Environment (IDE) as software and a Bluetooth (BT) Shield connected to an Arduino Uno R3 boards as hardware. The result was verified on a Graphical User Interface (GUI) built in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 with C sharp as default environment. It has shown that the proposed scheme works perfectly with the used hardware and software. In addition, the protocol thwarts the passive and active eavesdropping attacks which exist during SSP. These attacks are defeated by avoiding the exchange of passwords and public keys in plain text between the Master and the Slave. Therefore, this protocol is expected to be implemented by the SIG to enhance the security in Bluetooth connection

A Test Environment for Wireless Hacking in Domestic IoT Scenarios

Security is gaining importance in the daily life of every citizen. The advent of Internet of Things devices in our lives is changing our conception of being connected through a single device to a multiple connection in which the centre of connection is becoming the devices themselves. This conveys the attack vector for a potential attacker is exponentially increased. This paper presents how the concatenation of several attacks on communication protocols (WiFi, Bluetooth LE, GPS, 433 Mhz and NFC) can lead to undesired situations in a domestic environment. A comprehensive analysis of the protocols with the identification of their weaknesses is provided. Some relevant aspects of the whole attacking procedure have been presented to provide some relevant tips and countermeasures.This work has been partially supported by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation through the SecureEDGE project (PID2019-110565RB-I00), and by the by the Andalusian FEDER 2014-2020 Program through the SAVE project (PY18-3724). // Open Access funding provided thanks to the CRUE-CSIC agreement with Springer Nature. // Funding for open access charge: Universidad de Málaga / CBU

Survey and Systematization of Secure Device Pairing

Secure Device Pairing (SDP) schemes have been developed to facilitate secure communications among smart devices, both personal mobile devices and Internet of Things (IoT) devices. Comparison and assessment of SDP schemes is troublesome, because each scheme makes different assumptions about out-of-band channels and adversary models, and are driven by their particular use-cases. A conceptual model that facilitates meaningful comparison among SDP schemes is missing. We provide such a model. In this article, we survey and analyze a wide range of SDP schemes that are described in the literature, including a number that have been adopted as standards. A system model and consistent terminology for SDP schemes are built on the foundation of this survey, which are then used to classify existing SDP schemes into a taxonomy that, for the first time, enables their meaningful comparison and analysis.The existing SDP schemes are analyzed using this model, revealing common systemic security weaknesses among the surveyed SDP schemes that should become priority areas for future SDP research, such as improving the integration of privacy requirements into the design of SDP schemes. Our results allow SDP scheme designers to create schemes that are more easily comparable with one another, and to assist the prevention of persisting the weaknesses common to the current generation of SDP schemes.Comment: 34 pages, 5 figures, 3 tables, accepted at IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials 2017 (Volume: PP, Issue: 99

Blurtooth: Exploiting cross-transport key derivation in Bluetooth classic and Bluetooth low energy

Bluetooth is a pervasive wireless technology specified in an open standard. The standard defines Bluetooth Classic (BT) for high- throughput wireless services and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) very low-power ones. The standard also specifies security mechanisms, such as pairing, session establishment, and cross-transport key derivation (CTKD). CTKD enables devices to establish BT and BLE security keys by pairing just once. CTKD was introduced in 2014 with Bluetooth 4.2 to improve usability. However, the security im- plications of CTKD were not studied carefully. This work demonstrates that CTKD is a valuable and novel Blue- tooth attack surface. It enables, among others, to exploit BT and BLE just by targeting one of the two (i.e., Bluetooth cross-transport ex- ploitation). We present the design of the first cross-transport attacks on Bluetooth. Our attacks exploit issues that we identified in the specification of CTKD. For example, we find that CTKD enables an adversary to overwrite pairing keys across transports. We leverage these vulnerabilities to impersonate, machine-in-the-middle, and establish unintended sessions with any Bluetooth device support- ing CTKD. Since the presented attacks blur the security boundary between BT and BLE, we name them BLUR attacks. We provide a low-cost implementation of the attacks and test it on a broad set of devices. In particular, we successfully attack 16 devices with 14 unique Bluetooth chips from popular vendors (e.g., Cypress, Intel, Qualcomm, CSR, Google, and Samsung), with Bluetooth standard versions of up to 5.2. We discuss why the countermeasures in the Bluetooth are not effective against our attacks, and we develop and evaluate practical and effective alternatives