Bluetooth Connectivity Threatens Security (2013) | Hacker News Reader

Bluetooth Connectivity Threatens Security (2013)

kaspersky.com

40 pointsSharpDavies19 comments

Should probably add a (2013) to this title.

But yeah, I'm running the iOS13 beta, and one of the things it does it warn you if an app is trying to use bluetooth (other than audio). It's crazy how many apps request bluetooth access. Apps that definitely don't need it, other than to leak your location.

Just wait until apple adds a “recently accessed photos” list or better permissions. So many apps are going to be found to snarf photos due to the lax permissions.

I'm not sure what you mean by this. Uploading a user's entire photo album to some private cloud would be cost and time prohibitive. If I give an app access to my photos, it's generally because it's some kind of photo editing or social media app, and I would expect it to access my entire library since that's what I'm using it for.

Apple already provides an alternative to the default photos permission: the photo picker UI. No app needs to request photos permission for that because it only returns the picture the user picked (or null if they canceled the dialog). I think that's a reasonable compromise.

A sufficiently malicious and well-funded app might perform on-device face recognition (which is getting hardware support on newer devices) and only upload the hashes.

I can imagine it’s very easy to scan the users photos for anything potentially of value and just steal that. Looking for skin tones would allow the theft of potentially sensitive images with low bandwidth and time budgets. Yahoo and others already have pornography detection suites for things like public forums. It should really be the only option for 99% of apps.

The picker upload isn’t used much because app developers want to add their own chrome to image selection.

Right? I don't even understand when I should or shouldn't allow bluetooth access. Does this mean things won't work with my headphones? Almost all of my apps have requested it!

I wish Apple did a little more user training as to _what_ this means instead of a generic "let app use bluetooth?"

Just default to saying no. If you find that something actually does break as a result, you can always switch permissions back on in the Privacy tab in settings.

For certain permissions (i.e. location), Apple actually does require apps to provide a string indicating what the permission is needed for. I'm not sure if it's required for the Bluetooth permission, but my guess is that since it's a beta nobody has updated their binaries to include that string.

On android you have to request location access to scan for Bluetooth devices.

> For certain permissions (i.e. location), Apple actually does require apps to provide a string indicating what the permission is needed for.

Is the string in practice any more useful than update messages? (I wonder sometimes if anyone feels shame over 20 consecutive fixes with public-facing summary saying just "Stability and bug fixes." Apple itself is, of course, far from exempt.)

The permission strings are moderated with far more scrutiny. If an App Store reviewer can't understand what the point of the permission is, they will reject your app.

> Does this mean things won't work with my headphones?

It's not at all clear from the message it gives you, but I was worried about that too so I read the docs. It turns out the warning does not apply to anything trying to use bluetooth audio, because that goes through the audio API. So technically no app has access to your bluetooth headphones, they only have access to your audio subsystem which then accesses your audio device, bluetooth or otherwise.

Thank you, that is very helpful. I wish Apple included some sort of message conveying that information in their permission pop-up.

Craziest thing about Bluetooth, is that there are so many different "profiles" or features, of which some might, some might not be available on your bluetooth stack but you will be hard pressed to find out which ones are.

Some dongle might just support the one you need. Some might support 2 or 5.

From Wikipedia:

1 Advanced Audio Distribution Profile (A2DP)

2 Attribute Profile (ATT)

3 Audio/Video Remote Control Profile (AVRCP)

4 Basic Imaging Profile (BIP)

5 Basic Printing Profile (BPP)

6 Common ISDN Access Profile (CIP)

7 Cordless Telephony Profile (CTP)

8 Device ID Profile (DIP)

9 Dial-up Networking Profile (DUN)

10 Fax Profile (FAX)

11 File Transfer Profile (FTP)

12 Generic Audio/Video Distribution Profile (GAVDP)

13 Generic Access Profile (GAP)

14 Generic Attribute Profile (GATT)

15 Generic Object Exchange Profile (GOEP)

16 Hard Copy Cable Replacement Profile (HCRP)

17 Health Device Profile (HDP)

18 Hands-Free Profile (HFP)

19 Human Interface Device Profile (HID)

20 Headset Profile (HSP)

21 Intercom Profile (ICP)

22 LAN Access Profile (LAP)

23 Mesh Profile (MESH)

24 Message Access Profile (MAP)

25 OBject EXchange (OBEX)

26 Object Push Profile (OPP)

27 Personal Area Networking Profile (PAN)

28 Phone Book Access Profile (PBAP, PBA)

29 Proximity Profile (PXP)

30 Serial Port Profile (SPP)

31 Service Discovery Application Profile (SDAP)

32 SIM Access Profile (SAP, SIM, rSAP)

33 Synchronization Profile (SYNCH)

34 Synchronisation Mark-up Language Profile (SyncML)

35 Video Distribution Profile (VDP)

36 Wireless Application Protocol Bearer (WAPB)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Bluetooth_profiles

This is a staggering amount of wheel re-invention...makes me feel relieved that we have HTTP so clearly dominant in TCP/IP land.

I think Wi-Fi Direct is the way to go in the future. We've generally mastered TCP stacks and building an application that uses simple sockets is far less legwork than dealing with the intricacies of 30+ Bluetooth specifications.

I should say I'm no expert on Bluetooth. Why do we still use it? Is it a matter of legacy or does it have some kind of killer feature that Wi-Fi Direct can't compete with?

Bluetooth LE has orders of magnitude less power consumption than WiFi. Bear in mind this is a totally distinct protocol to Bluetooth. Many products use a Bluetooth LE and Bluetooth connection in tandem to gain the capabilities of both.

What really pisses me off is that with Bluetooth there is no way to use the microphone on your headphones without dropping back to horrible audio quality. It's astounding that tech companies are forcing Bluetooth when it can't even do basic things that aux did fine.

This seems like a very strange post? It describes a bunch of vulnerabilities that have been described in Bluetooth, but as far as I can tell these are all things that have been rectified - it's like saying that having IP connectivity threatens your security. It's correct, in the sense that anything that adds attack surface is a threat to your security, but misleading in the sense that Bluetooth is somehow special in this respect.

Oh. It's from 2013. That makes more sense. The prevalence of BTLE in modern life means that anyone who isn't thinking of Bluetooth as an attack vector is well behind the curve, but I can believe it back then - although initial Bluetooth attacks against inadequate devices were demonstrated back in 2005 with stuff like Bluejacking, so bringing that up in 2013 as an unconsidered vector still seems odd.

It's a 2013 article largely talking about attacks that were described in 2005, if this is telling you something new in 2019 and it has any impact on you then you're way behind where you should be.

> [...] anyone who isn't thinking of Bluetooth as an attack vector is well behind the curve [...]

Meanwhile in the future you can't even listen to music without enabling that attack vector, so you can bet everyone has it enabled 24/7.

And I really don't think bluetooth has or ever will be close to regular networks in terms of security maturity. It's like USB, it's so bad there really isn't much point in trying to fix it anymore.

You conclusion is something I don't agree with because many sensible things with USB can be fixed and can have a pretty big impact. For example, where I live some municipalities use Bluetooth for tracking and datamining of citizens. Some shops do the same thing but for other purposes. These are things that can relatively easily be fixed.

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