Wi-Fi Channel Saturation as a Mechanism to Improve Passive Capture of Bluetooth Through Channel Usage Restriction
Ian Lowe, William J Buchanan, Richard Macfarlane, Owen Lo
Journal of Networking Technology, Vol. 10, No. 4, 2019.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.6025/jnt/2019/10/4/124-155
Link: http://www.dline.info/jnt/fulltext/v10n4/jntv10n4_2.pdf
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 Bluetoothâ€™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.