Keynote: Uncovering Vulnerabilities in Bluetooth Devices with Automated Binary Analysis

Summary form only given, as follows. The complete presentation was not made available for publication as part of the conference proceedings. Being a near range wireless communication technology, Bluetooth, particularly its Low Energy version, is ubiquitous in the Internet-of-Things (IoT) today because of its extremely lower energy consumption. For instance, it has been widely used in many of our daily applications such as healthcare, fitness, wearables, retail, smart-home, and most recently automated digital contact tracing (when fighting for the COVID-19 pandemic). However, the security and privacy implication of these Bluetooth devices is not well understood. In this talk, Dr. Lin will present how to use binary analysis and wireless traffic inspection, to identify the security vulnerabilities in both Bluetooth protocols and implementations in real world devices. In particular, he will first talk about BLEScope, a tool developed from his research group to automatically fingerprint vulnerable Bluetooth devices from Google Play and then locate them in reality with a long range Bluetooth sniffer. Then, he will talk about FirmXRay, another tool developed from his group to automatically analyze the bare-metal firmware of Bluetooth devices to identify the linklayer vulnerabilities such as insecure pairing and unauthorized read/write. Finally, he will conclude his talk by discussing future directions in Bluetooth security.