Study and investigation of Bluetooth Low Energy security in the IoT environment

Bluetooth is one of the most popular and important wireless connection nowadays. Suffice it to say that, due to the pandemic situation caused by COVID-19 in 2020, the most useful italian application in order to do a good contact tracing (Immuni) is based on Bluetooth Low Energy technology. This is only an example of a global current issue to understand the significance of it. But Bluetooth standard is growing year by year with the growth of IoT systems used in daily life, such as smart locks, smart security systems, smart assistants, fitness trackers, and more. IoT environment has reached about 30 billion of devices in which Bluetooth (especially BLE) is one of the most radio protocol used. For these reasons it’s easy to understand that the security level of this kind of standard technology is an important key requirement. There are mainly two kinds of Bluetooth: one, the Bluetooth Basic Rate (also present with the optional feature Enhanced Data Rate BR/EDR) and second the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). This thesis is focused on the connection among different types of BLE devices in the smart home scenario, in order to investigate on the security standard applied. The study has been made through the exploitation of the Ubertooth One: an open source 2.4 GHz wireless development platform, with the aim of making Bluetooth experimentations, on a Ubuntu derivative distribution (it has been used xubuntu-18.04.5-desktop-amd64 available at http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/xubuntu/releases/18.04/release/). Powerful tools provided by the Ubertooth have been used in order to find some critical issues and some security vulnerabilities in different types of the BLE connection.