Detecting smartphone state changes through a Bluetooth based timing attack

Overview & Synopsis

Bluetooth is a popular wireless communication technology that is available on most mobile devices. Although Bluetooth includes security and privacy preserving mechanisms, we show that a Blue-tooth harmless inherent request-response mechanism can taint users privacy. More specifically, we introduce a timing attack that can be triggered by a remote attacker in order to infer information about a Bluetooth device state. By observing the L2CAP layer ping mechanism timing variations, it is possible to detect device state changes, for instance when the device goes in or out of the locked state. Our experimental results show that change point detection analysis of the timing allows to detect device state changes with a high accuracy. Finally, we discuss applications and countermeasures.