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Bluetooth communications can be hacked
As tech giants like Apple and Google plan the COVID-19 contact tracking app using Bluetooth technology, security researchers have questioned the move, saying that tracking apps that allow attackers to access a Bluetooth user also allow them to fully read all Bluetooth communications. The Apple-Google contact tracking system uses Bluetooth to identify and list phone users in your circle, and if the owner of one of those phones becomes infected with COVID-19, you will receive an alert.
In Singapore, the government urged people to download and use the Trace Together app, a Bluetooth-enabled contact tracking app developed by the Government Technology Agency, and mentioned that other apps are also being developed.
According to Niels Schweisshelm, Technical Program Manager, HackerOne, which is the San Francisco-based bug bounty platform, the entire attack surface of these contact tracking apps needs to be properly investigated.
“The potential privacy concerns surrounding these contact tracking solutions should remind governments that develop them that the security community will examine these applications more than any application in recent years,” Schweisshelm told IANS.
Android recently released a patch for a critical vulnerability related to BT protocol implementation. This vulnerability allowed an attacker to remotely take over specific Android devices without any user interaction by the victim. This vulnerability was responsibly disclosed to vendors and was therefore not exploited by malicious threat actors.
“However, this shows that the protocol and its implementation used by these contact tracking applications until recently suffered from a critical vulnerability,” Schweisshelm reported.
Joshua Berry, associate principal security consultant at Synopsys Software Integrity Group, said contact tracking applications use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) advertisements to send and collect messages to identify contacts made with other users. In general, receiving messages can present an opportunity for an attacker to send malformed data that could be mishandled by devices and applications.
“This is one way a device could be compromised. However, in the case of a contact tracking application, the content of the message sent to the devices through BLE contains data that the mobile application must passively collect and store Berry said.
A mobile app that only performs this basic functionality alone would not have enough functionality for an attacker to exploit to gain control over a mobile device.
“An attacker could try to overload a user’s device with BLE messages that seem valid enough to store them, which could cause the application to not work as desired or receive false positive contact notifications,” he explained.
Even if a contact tracking application does not collect and share GPS location data, this data could be shared with others as part of the contact tracking process. According to Samantha Isabelle Beaumont, senior security consultant, Synopsys Software Integrity Group, users can protect themselves by limiting the number of applications they download.
“They can limit the number of matching Bluetooth elements, the number of whitelisted Bluetooth elements, the known devices, and the amount of information they transfer through mechanisms like Bluetooth,” Beaumont said.
In their contact tracking application, according to Apple, “Privacy, transparency and consent are paramount in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with stakeholders. We will openly post information about our work so that others can analyze”.
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