Visible to the public Detecting Smartphone State Changes Through a Bluetooth Based Timing Attack

TitleDetecting Smartphone State Changes Through a Bluetooth Based Timing Attack
Publication TypeConference Paper
Year of Publication2018
AuthorsCelosia, Guillaume, Cunche, Mathieu
Conference NameProceedings of the 11th ACM Conference on Security & Privacy in Wireless and Mobile Networks
PublisherACM
Conference LocationNew York, NY, USA
ISBN Number978-1-4503-5731-9
KeywordsBluetooth, bluetooth security, Change point detection, composability, Human Behavior, L2CAP, privacy, pubcrawl, Resiliency, smartphone, Timing attack
AbstractBluetooth is a popular wireless communication technology that is available on most mobile devices. Although Bluetooth includes security and privacy preserving mechanisms, we show that a Bluetooth harmless inherent request-response mechanism can taint users privacy. More specifically, we introduce a timing attack that can be triggered by a remote attacker in order to infer information about a Bluetooth device state. By observing the L2CAP layer ping mechanism timing variations, it is possible to detect device state changes, for instance when the device goes in or out of the locked state. Our experimental results show that change point detection analysis of the timing allows to detect device state changes with a high accuracy. Finally, we discuss applications and countermeasures.
URLhttp://doi.acm.org/10.1145/3212480.3212494
DOI10.1145/3212480.3212494
Citation Keycelosia_detecting_2018