To defeat security threats such as man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) 4.2 and 5.x introduce the Secure Connections Only mode, under which a BLE device accepts only secure paring protocols including Passkey Entry and Numeric Comparison from an initiator, e.g., an Android mobile. However, the BLE specification does not explicitly require the Secure Connection Only mode of the initiator. Taking the Android's BLE programming framework for example, we found that it cannot enforce secure pairing, invalidating the security protection provided by the Secure Connection Only mode. The same problem applies to Apple iOS too.
Specifically, we examine the life cycle of a BLE pairing process in Android and identify four severe design flaws. These design flaws can be exploited by attackers to perform downgrading attacks, forcing the BLE pairing protocols to run in the insecure mode without the users' awareness. To validate our findings, we selected and tested 18 popular BLE commercial products and our experimental results proved that downgrading attacks and MITM attacks were all possible to these products. All 3501 BLE apps from Androzoo are also subject to these attacks. For defense, we have designed and implemented a prototype of the Secure Connection Only mode on Android 8 through the Android Open Source Project (AOSP). We have reported the identified BLE pairing vulnerabilities to Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG), Google, Apple, Texas Instruments (TI) and all of them are actively addressing this issue. Google rated the reported security flaw a High Severity.
In this paper, we propose a simple enhancement for the passkey entry protocol in the authentication stage 1 of Secure Simple Pairing using preexisting cryptographic hash functions and random integer generation present in the protocol. The new protocol is more secure and efficient than previous known protocols. Our research mainly focuses on strengthening the passkey entry protocol and protecting the devices against passive eavesdropping and active Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in both Bluetooth Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) and Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth LE). This method can b…
Bluetooth is a communication technology used to wirelessly exchange data between devices. In the last few years there have been found a great number of security vulnerabilities, and adversaries are taking advantage of them causing harm and significant loss. Numerous system security updates have been approved and installed in order to sort out security holes and bugs, and prevent attacks that could expose personal or other valuable information. But those updates are not sufficient and appropriate and new bugs keep showing up. In Bluetooth technology, pairing is identified as the step where most…
Exponential growth of the volume of Bluetooth-enabled devices indicates that it has become a popular way of wireless interconnections for exchanging information. The main goal of this paper is to analyze the most critical Bluetooth attacks in real scenarios. In order to find out the major vulnerabilities in modern Bluetooth-enabled mobile devices several attacks have performed successfully such as- Surveillance, Obfuscation, Sniffing, Unauthorized Direct Data Access (UDDA) and Man-in-the-Middle Attack (MITM). To perform the testbed, several devices are used such as mobile phones, laptops, note…
As an interconnection technology, Bluetooth has to address all traditional security problems, well known from the distributed networks. Moreover, as Bluetooth networks are formed by the radio links, there are also additional security aspects whose impact is yet not well understood. In this paper, we propose a novel Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attack against Bluetooth enabled mobile phone that support Simple Secure Pairing(SSP). From the literature it was proved that the SSP association models such as Numeric comparison, Just works and passkey Entry are not more secure. Here we propose the Out Of …
The Bluetooth standard specifies two transports: Bluetooth Classic (BT) for high-throughput wireless services and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) for very low-power scenarios. BT and BLE have dedicated pairing protocols and devices have to pair over BT and BLE to use both securely. In 2014, the Bluetooth standard (v4.2) addressed this usability issue by introducing Cross-Transport Key Derivation (CTKD). CTKD allows establishing BT and BLE pairing keys just by pairing over one of the two transports. While CTKD crosses the security boundary between BT and BLE, little is known about the internals of C…
Low-energy Bluetooth devices have become ubiquitous and widely used for different applications. Among these, Bluetooth trackers are becoming popular as they allow users to track the location of their physical objects. To do so, Bluetooth trackers are often built-in within other commercial products connected to a larger crowdsourced tracking system. Such a system, however, can pose a threat to the security and privacy of the users, for instance, by revealing the location of a user's valuable object. In this paper, we introduce a set of security properties and investigate the state of commercial…
Device pairing in large Internet of Things (IoT) deployments is a challenge for device manufacturers and users. Bluetooth offers a comparably smooth trust on first use pairing experience. Bluetooth, though, is well-known for security flaws in the pairing process. In this paper, we analyze how Apple improves the security of Bluetooth pairing while still maintaining its usability and specification compliance. The proprietary protocol that resides on top of Bluetooth is called MagicPairing. It enables the user to pair a device once with Apple's ecosystem and then seamlessly use it with all their …
Bluetooth (BT) has revolutionized close-range communication enabling smart capabilities in everyday devices through wireless technology. One of the most important sub-domains of Internet-of-Things (IoT) specializes in the usage of BT technologies to develop smart homes and environments, which include hospitals, buildings, shopping facilities, etc. to offer a wide-range of features, like instantaneous and remote access to ventilation, lighting, security, localization, and tracking. However, the deployment of such features in smart infrastructures are typically unaccompanied by appropriate secur…
The market for Bluetooth Low Energy devices is booming and, at the same time, has become an attractive target for adversaries. To improve BLE security at large, we present BTLEmap, an auditing application for BLE environments. BTLEmap is inspired by network discovery and security auditing tools such as Nmap for IP-based networks. It allows for device enumeration, GATT service discovery, and device fingerprinting. It goes even further by integrating a BLE advertisement dissector, data exporter, and a user-friendly UI, including a proximity view. BTLEmap currently runs on iOS and macOS using App…
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 in…
The proliferation of Bluetooth mobile device communications into all aspects of modern society raises security questions by both academicians and practitioners. This environment prompted an investigation into the real-world use of Bluetooth protocols along with an analysis of documented security attacks. The experiment discussed in this paper collected data for one week in a local coffee shop. The data collection took about an hour each day and identified 478 distinct devices. The contribution of this research is two-fold. First, it provides insight into real-world Bluetooth protocols that are…
A Bluetooth finder is a small battery-powered device that can be attached to important items such as bags, keychains, or bikes. The finder maintains a Bluetooth connection with the user's phone, and the user is notified immediately on connection loss. We provide the first comprehensive security and privacy analysis of current commercial Bluetooth finders. Our analysis reveals several significant security vulnerabilities in those products concerning mobile applications and the corresponding backend services in the cloud. We also show that all analyzed cloud-based products leak more private data…
Bluetooth pairing establishes trust on first use between two devices by creating a shared key. Similar to certificate warnings in TLS, the Bluetooth specification requires warning users upon issues with this key, because this can indicate ongoing Machine-in-the-Middle (MitM) attacks. This paper uncovers that none of the major Bluetooth stacks warns users, which violates the specification. Clear warnings would protect users from recently published and potential future security issues in Bluetooth authentication and encryption.
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 frequen…
Overnight, Apple has turned its hundreds-of-million-device ecosystem into the world's largest crowd-sourced location tracking network called offline finding (OF). OF leverages online finder devices to detect the presence of missing offline devices using Bluetooth and report an approximate location back to the owner via the Internet. While OF is not the first system of its kind, it is the first to commit to strong privacy goals. In particular, OF aims to ensure finder anonymity, untrackability of owner devices, and confidentiality of location reports. This paper presents the first comprehensive…
Contact tracing is the techno-choice of reference to address the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of the current approaches have severe privacy and security issues and fail to offer a sustainable contact tracing infrastructure. We address these issues introducing an innovative, privacy-preserving, sustainable, and experimentally tested architecture that leverages batteryless BLE beacons.
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons have been increasingly used in smart city applications, such as location-based and proximity-based services, to enable Internet of Things to interact with people in vicinity or enhance context-awareness. Their widespread deployment in human-centric applications makes them an attractive target to adversaries for social or economic reasons. In fact, beacons are reportedly exposed to various security issues and privacy concerns. A characterization of attacks against beacon systems is given to help understand adversary motives, required adversarial capabilities, …
This work describes an integrated solution to face a civil security problem in the area of Search And Rescue (SAR) of missing people. This proposal is based on the use of emerging technologies such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV), also known as drones, and the use of simulated beacons on smartphones. In particular, in the presented tool, drones fly synchronously in a specific area so that each drone uses on-board sensors to scan and detect any signal emitted by Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons from smartphones of missing people. This technique allows getting the GPS position of any detecte…
In this paper we discuss the security of a distributed inner product (DIP) protocol [IEEE TIFS, 11(1), (2016), 59-73]. We show information leakage in this protocol that does not happen in an ideal execution of DIP functionality. In some scenarios, this information leakage enables one of the parties to completely learn the other party's input. We will give examples of such scenarios.
In Wireless Sensor Networks, the sensor nodes are battery powered small devices designed for long battery life. These devices also lack in terms of processing capability and memory. In order to provide high confidentiality to these resource constrained network nodes, a suitable security algorithm is needed to be deployed that can establish a balance between security level and processing overhead. The objective of this research work is to perform a security analysis and performance evaluation of recently proposed Secure Force algorithm. This paper shows the comparison of Secure Force 64, 128, a…
This paper is concerned with several security notions for information theoretically secure encryptions defined by the variational (statistical) distance. To ensure the perfect secrecy (PS), the mutual information is often used to evaluate the statistical independence between a message and a cryptogram. On the other hand, in order to recognize the information theoretically secure encryptions and computationally secure ones comprehensively, it is necessary to reconsider the notion of PS in terms of the variational distance. However, based on the variational distance, three kinds of definitions f…
Java platform and third-party libraries provide various security features to facilitate secure coding. However, misusing these features can cost tremendous time and effort of developers or cause security vulnerabilities in software. Prior research was focused on the misuse of cryptography and SSL APIs, but did not explore the key fundamental research question: what are the biggest challenges and vulnerabilities in secure coding practices? In this paper, we conducted a comprehensive empirical study on StackOverflow posts to understand developers' concerns on Java secure coding, their programmin…
For network computers to communicate to one another, they need to know one another's IP address and MAC address. Address Resolution Protocol (ARP) is developed to find the Ethernet address that map to a specific IP address. The source computer broadcasts the request for Ethernet address and eventually the target computer replies. The IP to Ethernet address mapping would later be stored in an ARP Cache for some time duration, after which the process is repeated. Since ARP is susceptible to ARP poisoning attacks, we propose to make it unicast, centralized and secure, along with a secure design o…
Increasing automation and external connectivity in industrial control systems (ICS) demand a greater emphasis on software-level communication security. In this article, we propose a secure-by-design development method for building ICS applications, where requirements from security standards like ISA/IEC 62443 are fulfilled by design-time abstractions called secure links. Proposed as an extension to the IEC 61499 development standard, secure links incorporate both light-weight and traditional security mechanisms into applications with negligible effort. Applications containing secure links can …
In a 2005 IACR report, Wang published an efficient identity-based key agreement protocol (IDAK) suitable for resource constrained devices. The author shows that the IDAK key agreement protocol is secure in the Bellare-Rogaway model with random oracles and also provides separate ad-hoc security proofs claiming that the IDAK protocol is not vulnerable to Key Compromise Impersonation attacks and also enjoys Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS). In this report, we review the security properties of the protocol and point out that it is vulnerable to Unknown Key Share attacks. Although such attacks are oft…
Previous Web access authentication systems often use either the Web or the Mobile channel individually to confirm the claimed identity of the remote user. This paper proposes a new protocol using multifactor authentication system that is both secure and highly usable. It uses a novel approach based on Transaction Identification Code and SMS to enforce extra security level with the traditional Login/password system. The system provides a highly secure environment that is simple to use and deploy, that does not require any change in infrastructure or protocol of wireless networks. This Protocol …
This paper explains the recent developments in security and encryption. The Butterfly cipher and quantum cryptography are reviewed and compared. Examples of their relative uses are discussed and suggestions for future developments considered. In addition application to network security together with a substantial review of classification of encryption systems and a summary of security weaknesses are considered.
Google and Apple have jointly provided an API for exposure notification in order to implement decentralized contract tracing apps using Bluetooth Low Energy, the so-called "Google/Apple Proposal", which we abbreviate by "GAP". We demonstrate that in real-world scenarios the current GAP design is vulnerable to (i) profiling and possibly de-anonymizing infected persons, and (ii) relay-based wormhole attacks that basically can generate fake contacts with the potential of affecting the accuracy of an app-based contact tracing system. For both types of attack, we have built tools that can easily be…
Chaotic communications based on semiconductor lasers have aroused great research interest since 1990s. Physical-layer encryption using chaotic lasers is an alternative to transmit message rapidly and confidentially. There are some practical devices and setups for optical chaotic communications, which are intuitively considered to be secure. However, there is lack of a set of security evaluation rules for these communication setups. According to the recent literature, we summarize several criteria for optical chaotic communications to evaluate the security and point out some methods to enhance …
Default configuration of various software applications often neglects security objectives. We tested the default configuration of TLS in dozen web and application servers. The results show that "secure by default" principle should be adopted more broadly by developers and package maintainers. In addition, system administrators cannot rely blindly on default security options.
In the Russian cards problem, Alice, Bob and Cath draw $a$, $b$ and $c$ cards, respectively, from a publicly known deck. Alice and Bob must then communicate their cards to each other without Cath learning who holds a single card. Solutions in the literature provide weak security, where Cath does not know with certainty who holds each card that is not hers, or perfect security, where Cath learns no probabilistic information about who holds any given card from Alice and Bob's exchange. We propose an intermediate notion, which we call $\varepsilon$-strong security, where the probabilities perceiv…
A new framework for information hiding security, called chaos-security, has been proposed in a previous study. It is based on the evaluation of unpredictability of the scheme, whereas existing notions of security, as stego-security, are more linked to information leaks. It has been proven that spread-spectrum techniques, a well-known stego-secure scheme, are chaos-secure too. In this paper, the links between the two notions of security is deepened and the usability of chaos-security is clarified, by presenting a novel data hiding scheme that is twice stego and chaos-secure. This last scheme ha…
Advances in smart devices has witnessed major developments in many mobile applications such as Android applications. These smart devices normally interconnect to the internet using wireless technology and applications using the TFTP protocol among these wireless devices are becoming commonplace. In this work, we present an enhanced lightweight security protocol for smart device and server communications using Trivial File Transfer Protocol (TFTP). We suggest the use of lightweight symmetric encryption for data encryption and asymmetric encryption for key exchange protocols in TFTP. The target …
We show that stand-alone statistically secure random oblivious transfer protocols based on two-party stateless primitives are statistically universally composable. I.e. they are simulatable secure with an unlimited adversary, an unlimited simulator and an unlimited environment machine. Our result implies that several previous oblivious transfer protocols in the literature which were proven secure under weaker, non-composable definitions of security can actually be used in arbitrary statistically secure applications without lowering the security.
In [3], the authors proposed a highly efficient secure and privacy-preserving scheme for secure vehicular communications. The proposed scheme consists of four protocols: system setup, protocol for STP and STK distribution, protocol for common string synchronization, and protocol for vehicular communications. Here we define the security models for the protocol for STP and STK distribution, and the protocol for vehicular communications,respectively. We then prove that these two protocols are secure in our models.
Logging systems are an essential component of security systems and their security has been widely studied. Recently (2017) it was shown that existing secure logging protocols are vulnerable to crash attack in which the adversary modifies the log file and then crashes the system to make it indistinguishable from a normal system crash. The attacker was assumed to be non-adaptive and not be able to see the file content before modifying and crashing it (which will be immediately after modifying the file). The authors also proposed a system called SLiC that protects against this attacker. In this p…
The rising need of secret image sharing with high security has led to much advancement in lucrative exchange of important images which contain vital and confidential information. Multi secret image sharing system (MSIS) is an efficient and robust method for transmitting one or more secret images securely. In recent research, n secret images are encrypted into n or n+ 1 shared images and stored in different database servers. The decoder has to receive all n or n+1 encrypted images to reproduce the secret image. One can recover partial secret information from n-1 or fewer shared images, which po…
In this paper we study the security of the Bluetooth stream cipher E0 from the viewpoint it is a "difference stream cipher", that is, it is defined by a system of explicit difference equations over the finite field GF(2). This approach highlights some issues of the Bluetooth encryption such as the invertibility of its state transition map, a special set of 14 bits of its 132-bit state which when guessed implies linear equations among the other bits and finally a small number of spurious keys, with 83 guessed bits, which are compatible with a keystream of about 60 bits. Exploiting these issues,…
Over the last years, security kernels have played a promising role in reshaping the landscape of platform security on today's ubiquitous embedded devices. Security kernels, such as separation kernels, enable constructing high-assurance mixed-criticality execution platforms. They reduce the software portion of the system's trusted computing base to a thin layer, which enforces isolation between low- and high-criticality components. The reduced trusted computing base minimizes the system attack surface and facilitates the use of formal methods to ensure functional correctness and security of the…
In recent years, researchers have proposed \emph{cyber-insurance} as a suitable risk-management technique for enhancing security in Internet-like distributed systems. However, amongst other factors, information asymmetry between the insurer and the insured, and the inter-dependent and correlated nature of cyber risks have contributed in a big way to the failure of cyber-insurance markets. Security experts have argued in favor of operating system (OS) platform switching (ex., from Windows to Unix-based OSs) or secure OS adoption as being one of the techniques that can potentially mitigate the p…
Cloud computing is a revolutionary concept that has brought a paradigm shift in the IT world. This has made it possible to manage and run businesses without even setting up an IT infrastructure. It offers multi-fold benefits to the users moving to a cloud, while posing unknown security and privacy issues. User authentication is one such growing concern and is greatly needed in order to ensure privacy and security in a cloud computing environment. This paper discusses the security at different levels viz. network, application and virtualization, in a cloud computing environment. A security fram…
Password security can no longer provide enough security in the area of remote user authentication. Considering this security drawback, researchers are trying to find solution with multifactor remote user authentication system. Recently, three factor remote user authentication using biometric and smart card has drawn a considerable attention of the researchers. However, most of the current proposed schemes have security flaws. They are vulnerable to attacks like user impersonation attack, server masquerading attack, password guessing attack, insider attack, denial of service attack, forgery att…
Modern electronic systems become evermore complex, yet remain modular, with integrated circuits (ICs) acting as versatile hardware components at their heart. Electronic design automation (EDA) for ICs has focused traditionally on power, performance, and area. However, given the rise of hardware-centric security threats, we believe that EDA must also adopt related notions like secure by design and secure composition of hardware. Despite various promising studies, we argue that some aspects still require more efforts, for example: effective means for compilation of assumptions and constraints fo…
Security and privacy in Direct Load Control (DLC) is a fundamental challenge in smart grids. In this paper, we propose a blockchain-based framework to increase security and privacy of DLC. We propose a method whereby participating nodes share their data with the distribution company in an anonymous and secure manner. To reduce the associated overhead for data dissemination, we propose a hash-based transaction generation method. We also outline the DLC process for managing the load in consumer site. Qualitative analysis demonstrates the security and privacy of the proposed method.
This paper investigates how secure information sharing with external vendors can be achieved in an Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT). It also identifies necessary security requirements for secure information sharing based on identified security challenges stated by the industry. The paper then proposes a roadmap for improving security in IIoT which investigates both short-term and long-term solutions for protecting IIoT devices. The short-term solution is mainly based on integrating existing good practices. The paper also outlines a long term solution for protecting IIoT devices with fine-g…
