Billions of Android phones and smart devices open to attack -- what to do now [updated]
Billions of Android phones and smart devices open to set on -- what to do now [updated]
UPDATED with news of possible prepare for Android devices. This story was originally published Sept. sixteen, 2020.
Billions of Android smartphones and tablets, Linux PCs and servers, and smart-dwelling house and wearable devices are vulnerable to a Bluetooth flaw that could let hackers and pranksters access them without authorisation and give the devices simulated information, academic researchers based at Purdue Academy in Indiana take constitute.
The flaw, named BLESA for Bluetooth Low Energy Spoofing Attack, besides affects iOS devices, simply Apple patched information technology with the iOS 13.4 and iPad Bone 13.4 updates in March.
Windows devices are not vulnerable. Pb researcher Jianlang Wu told Tom'southward Guide that the team was not able to test whether macOS devices might be vulnerable.
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"To ease its adoption, BLE [the Bluetooth Depression Free energy protocol] requires limited or no user interaction to establish a connection between 2 devices," the researchers wrote in their bookish paper. "Unfortunately, this simplicity is the root cause of several security issues."
The researchers said they informed Google of the BLESA flaw in Android in April 2019, but were told that another team had informed Google of the same flaw only 3 days earlier. Yet, Android 10 running on a Google Pixel XL was "still vulnerable" to BLESA attacks as of June 2020, the researchers said.
The researchers said many smart-dwelling house and wearable devices, including the August smart lock, the Fitbit Versa smartwatch, the Nest Cam Indoor camera and the Nest Protect smoke detector, were also vulnerable to BLESA attacks because they did not properly authenticate previously paired devices.
Tom's Guide has reached out to Google for clarification regarding Android, and nosotros will update this story when we receive a answer. ZDNet was among the get-go publications to report this story.
How to protect yourself from BLESA attacks
The BLESA flaw doesn't exist in the older, "classic" versions of Bluetooth that you would use to connect your wireless headphones to your smartphone. Rather, it's in the newer Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol, which takes up less power and transmits data at a slower rate than regular Bluetooth.
BLE is platonic for connecting smart-home and wear devices, such equally fettle bands or light bulbs, that don't need to transmit a whole lot of data and whose batteries would be quickly tuckered by regular Bluetooth.
Unfortunately, most smartphones don't allow you turn off BLE while leaving regular Bluetooth on. So to make certain you're not susceptible to BLESA attacks, turn off Bluetooth on your Android phone whenever you're not using it. Yous should as well go into your Bluetooth settings and "forget" whatsoever previously paired devices you lot no longer utilise.
If you're on an iPhone, simply make sure that you're updated to iOS 13.4 or later. Linux distributions will exist patched by replacing a vulnerable BLE software library with ane that doesn't have the BLESA event.
How the BLESA attack works
When you pair i Bluetooth device with another, each device "remembers" the other and then that they can reconnect again without having to repeat the pairing process. Withal, the devices still take to verify their identity to each other when they reconnect.
The BLESA flaw results when previously paired devices don't properly ask for verification, or don't implement verification properly, during reconnection. An attacker can exploit these shortfalls and gain access to one device while pretending to be the other. The researchers cite figures that estimate that 5 billion devices worldwide volition use BLE by 2023.
Using the BLESA flaw, a nearby attacker could pretend to exist a device that your phone has already paired with, and connect to your telephone. Simply one of the 2 devices needs to have the BLESA flaw.
"That could atomic number 82 to several scenarios, according to the researchers," said a posting on the Purdue website. "For example, malicious keystrokes could be injected into the smartphone or desktop when information technology reconnects to a BLE keyboard. Or a fake glucose level value can be injected into the smartphone while the user reads data from a BLE glucose monitor. Fake fettle data can be received by the user when it reconnects to a fettle tracker."
The attacker would demand to know at least some of the identifying features of ane of the two devices, but those could be easily obtained past "sniffing" the legitimate Bluetooth traffic between the 2 devices.
The researchers demonstrated this assault in a video showing an Android telephone connecting start with a Oura "smart" ring, and so with a laptop pretending to be the Oura ring. The Oura Android app tin can't tell the difference. (Withal, the Oura itself was better protected confronting BLESA than most other wearable devices tested by the researchers.)
"By using BLESA, the attacker successfully impersonates the ring, injects spoofed data to the phone, and the companion application of the band running on the phone accepts and displays the spoofed data," the academic paper says.
The enquiry squad was led by Jianlang Wu and included five of his Purdue colleagues and ane researcher from the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland. They presented their findings during the USENIX WOOT '20 virtual briefing in August, during which the squad won the honour for best paper of the briefing.
You can view their entire USENIX presentation, view their slides or read their enquiry paper online without any restrictions.
Update: Android vulnerability may take been lessened
Later Sept. sixteen, atomic number 82 researcher Jianliang Wu emailed Tom'south Guide to alarm of united states of america a new argument by the research squad.
"We were recently brash by Google that the gear up to an earlier CVE (2019-2225) [part of the December 2019 Android security updates] will mitigate BLESA. Due to time constraint, we take non independently verified its effectiveness against BLESA; simply we will practice so in the near future. We'd similar to thank colleagues from Google for sharing this data."
Mitigation isn't a complete fix, only it's something that should reduce the impact of the vulnerability. Tom's Guide has non received any reply from Google regarding the possible BLESA vulnerability in Android Bluetooth Depression Free energy software.
Source: https://www.tomsguide.com/news/blesa-bluetooth-attack
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