Wi-Fi Channel Saturation as a Mechanism to Improve Passive Capture of Bluetooth Through Channel Usage Restriction

Lowe, Ian; Buchanan, William J.; Macfarlane, Richard; Lo, Owen

Abstract

Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that provides audio and data links between personal smartphones and playback devices, such as speakers, headsets and car entertainment systems. Since its introduction in 2001, security researchers have suggested that the protocol is weak, and prone to a variety of attacks against its authentication, link management and encryption schemes. Key researchers in the field have suggested that reliable passive sniffing of Bluetooth traffic would enable the practical application of a range of currently hypothesised attacks. Restricting Bluetooth's frequency hopping behaviour by manipulation of the available channels, in order to make brute force attacks more effective has been a frequently proposed avenue of future research from the literature. This paper has evaluated the proposed approach in a series of experiments using the software defined radio tools and custom hardware developed by the Ubertooth project. The work concludes that the mechanism suggested by previous researchers may not deliver the proposed improvements, but describes an as yet undocumented interaction between Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies which may provide a Denial of Service attack mechanism.

Citation

Lowe, I., Buchanan, W. J., Macfarlane, R., & Lo, O. (2019). Wi-Fi Channel Saturation as a Mechanism to Improve Passive Capture of Bluetooth Through Channel Usage Restriction. Journal of Networking Technology, 10(4), 124-155. https://doi.org/10.6025/jnt/2019/10/4/124-155

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Oct 1, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Dec 31, 2019
• Publication Date: Dec 31, 2019
• Deposit Date: Feb 12, 2020
• Publicly Available Date: Feb 17, 2020
• Journal: Journal of Networking Technology
• Print ISSN: 0976-898X
• Electronic ISSN: 0976-8998
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 10
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 124-155
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.6025/jnt/2019/10/4/124-155
• Keywords: Bluetooth; Channel Usage; Wireless Technology
• Public URL: http://researchrepository.napier.ac.uk/Output/2554294
• Publisher URL: http://www.dline.info/download.php?sn=2899