Practical bluetooth traffic sniffing: Systems and privacy implications

Wahhab Albazrqaoe, Jun Huang, Guoliang Xing

Research output: Chapters, Conference Papers, Creative and Literary WorksRGC 32 - Refereed conference paper (with host publication)peer-review

41 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

With the prevalence of personal Bluetooth devices, potential breach of user privacy has been an increasing concern. To date, sniffing Bluetooth traffic has been widely considered an extremely intricate task due to Bluetooth's indiscoverable mode, vendor-dependent adaptive hopping behavior, and the interference in the open 2.4 GHz band. In this paper, we present BlueEar - a practical Bluetooth traffic sniffer. BlueEar features a novel dual-radio architecture where two Bluetooth-compliant radios coordinate with each other on learning the hopping sequence of indiscoverable Bluetooth networks, predicting adaptive hopping behavior, and mitigating the impacts of RF interference. Experiment results show that BlueEar can maintain a packet capture rate higher than 90% consistently in real-world environments, where the target Bluetooth network exhibits diverse hopping behaviors in the presence of dynamic interference from coexisting 802.11 devices. In addition, we discuss the privacy implications of the BlueEar system, and present a practical countermeasure that effectively reduces the packet capture rate of the sniffer to 20%. The proposed countermeasure can be easily implemented on the Bluetooth master device while requiring no modification to slave devices like keyboards and headsets.
Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationMobiSys 2016 - Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages333-345
ISBN (Print)9781450342698
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 20 Jun 2016
Externally publishedYes
Event14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2016 - Singapore, Singapore
Duration: 25 Jun 201630 Jun 2016

Publication series

NameMobiSys 2016 - Proceedings of the 14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services

Conference

Conference14th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services, MobiSys 2016
Country/TerritorySingapore
CitySingapore
Period25/06/1630/06/16

Bibliographical note

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