Bluetooth pairing vulnerability

27 Jul 2018

The Bluetooth SIG released an errata for the 4.2 and 5.0 versions of Bluetooth specification on July 23^rd relating to a potential vulnerability with the pairing procedures.

For Bluetooth low energy; this only impacts the low energy secure connections mode of pairing, or LESC. LESC is using Diffie Helman key exchange and the potential vulnerability has to do with key validation not bein a mandatory feature in the previous releases of the specification.

Nordic Semiconductor is taking security very serious and we already mitigated this attack in the nRF5 SDK release 15 back in March 2018.

For more information please check out our the white paper about this issue on the infocenter

danielmeyers over 2 years ago

I don't know how to explain it but recently our system administrator said that in the office security management data should be sent over the L2CAP security management channel. The security management protocol provides the user interface via the GAP layer. The user sets input and output capabilities and device pairing parameters. How am I supposed to set this up, I don't understand anything, because I'm a writer and I'm just providing coursework writing help to https://writemypapers4me.net/coursework-help/. Now I have to learn it, and here I am reading this forum.
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PaKa over 5 years ago in reply to Bragma

Hi, this is described in the whitepaper linked to in the original post.
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Bragma over 5 years ago

I am using S332 in a new project and I am tied to SDK 14.2. What's the suggested mitigation in this case? Thanks!
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PaKa over 6 years ago in reply to kordi

Hi,

with Bluetooth there are different security levels. If you want the highest level of security you will need to use some kind of code during pairing. This is needed to get Man In The Middle (MITM) protection. You can make solutions without codes (display/keyboard less applications) but then you will lack the MITM protection and you will not have the highest security level.
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Ulrich Myhre over 6 years ago in reply to kordi

I'm not exactly sure what you're asking about. If you already use LESC pairing successfully, you only need to update to a newer SDK that has the automatic verification step. Android will ship their own updates for this. Only one side needs to be patched in order to render the attack (nearly) useless. If you are not using LESC, this vulnerability does not affect you.
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