New Attack exploiting serious Bluetooth weakness can intercept sensitive data

'Researchers have demonstrated a serious weakness in the Bluetooth
wireless standard that could allow hackers to intercept keystrokes,
address books, and other sensitive data sent from billions of devices.

Dubbed Key Negotiation of Bluetooth—or KNOB for short—the attack
forces two or more devices to choose an encryption key just a single
byte in length before establishing a Bluetooth connection. Attackers
within radio range can then use commodity hardware to quickly crack
the key. From there, attackers can use the cracked key to decrypt data
passing between the devices. The types of data susceptible could
include keystrokes passing between a wireless keyboard and computer,
address books uploaded from a phone to a car dashboard, or photographs
exchanged between phones.

KNOB doesn't require an attacker to have any previously shared secret
material or to observe the pairing process of the targeted devices.
The exploit is invisible to Bluetooth apps and the operating systems
they run on, making the attack almost impossible to detect without
highly specialized equipment. KNOB also exploits a weakness in the
Bluetooth standard itself. That means, in all likelihood, that the
vulnerability affects just about every device that's compliant with
the specification. The researchers have simulated the attack on 14
different Bluetooth chips—including those from Broadcom, Apple, and
Qualcomm—and found all of them to be vulnerable.

"The Key Negotiation Of Bluetooth (KNOB) attack exploits a
vulnerability at the architectural level of Bluetooth," the
researchers wrote in a research paper published this week. "The
vulnerable encryption key negotiation protocol endangers potentially
all standard compliant Bluetooth devices, regardless [of] their
Bluetooth version number and implementation details. We believe that
the encryption key negotiation protocol has to be fixed as soon as
possible."'

-- source: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/08/new-attack-exploiting-serious-bluetooth-weakness-can-intercept-sensitive-data/

Cheers, Peter
-- 
Peter Reutemann
Dept. of Computer Science
University of Waikato, NZ
+64 (7) 858-5174
http://www.cms.waikato.ac.nz/~fracpete/
http://www.data-mining.co.nz/
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