Paper Info
Title
InternalBlue - Bluetooth Binary Patching and Experimentation Framework
Abstract
Bluetooth is one of the most established technologies for short range digital wireless data transmission. With the advent of wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT), Bluetooth has again gained importance, which makes security research and protocol optimizations imperative. Surprisingly, there is a lack of openly available tools and experimental platforms to scrutinize Bluetooth. In particular, system aspects and close to hardware protocol layers are mostly uncovered. We reverse engineer multiple Broadcom Bluetooth chipsets that are widespread in off-the-shelf devices. Thus, we offer deep insights into the internal architecture of a popular commercial family of Bluetooth controllers used in smartphones, wearables, and IoT platforms. Reverse engineered functions can then be altered with our InternalBlue Python framework---outperforming evaluation kits, which are limited to documented and vendor-defined functions. The modified Bluetooth stack remains fully functional and high-performance. Hence, it provides a portable low-cost research platform. InternalBlue is a versatile framework and we demonstrate its abilities by implementing tests and demos for known Bluetooth vulnerabilities. Moreover, we discover a novel critical security issue affecting a large selection of Broadcom chipsets that allows executing code within the attacked Bluetooth firmware. We further show how to use our framework to fix bugs in chipsets out of vendor support and how to add new security features to Bluetooth firmware.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3307334.3326089
Proceedings of the 17th Annual International Conference on Mobile Systems, Applications, and Services
Keywords
Field
DocType
binary patching, bluetooth, firmware, fuzzing, iot, link layer, security
Fuzz testing,Wearable computer,Computer science,Link layer,Protocol stack,Chipset,Bluetooth stack,Bluetooth,Embedded system,Firmware
Journal
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6661-8
2
0.40
References 
Authors
0
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Dennis Mantz120.40
Jiska Classen2339.10
Matthias Schulz311112.74
Matthias Hollick475097.29