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posted by chromas on Sunday November 07 2021, @02:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the you-can't-handle-the-tooth dept.

BrakTooth is a collection of flaws affecting commercial Bluetooth stacks on more than 1,400 chipsets used in billions of devices – including smartphones, PCs, toys, internet-of-things (IoT) devices and industrial equipment – that rely on Bluetooth Classic (BT) for communication.

On Thursday, CISA urged manufacturers, vendors and developers to patch or employ workarounds.

The PoC has been made available on the BrakTooth website on GitHub.

As the paper pointed out, all that attackers need to do to pick apart the BrakTooth bugs is an off-the-shelf ESP32 board that can be had for $14.80, (or as low as $4 for an alternative board on AliExpress), custom Link Manager Protocol (LMP) firmware, and a computer to run the PoC tool.

Researchers from the University of Singapore disclosed the initial group of 16 vulnerabilities (now up to 22), collectively dubbed BrakTooth, in a paper published in September. They found the bugs in the closed commercial BT stack used by 1,400+ embedded chip components and detailed a host of attack types they can cause: Mainly denial of service (DoS) via firmware crashes (the term “brak” is actually Norwegian for “crash”). One of the bugs can also lead to arbitrary code execution (ACE).

Since the paper was published, there have been a number of updates, as vendors have scrambled to patch or to figure out whether or not they will in fact patch, and as researchers have uncovered additional vulnerable devices.


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by Opportunist on Sunday November 07 2021, @06:54PM

    by Opportunist (5545) on Sunday November 07 2021, @06:54PM (#1194463)

    They themselves are already deliberately crippling their firmware, until 1.3 (1.2? forgot) you could actually do much more interesting stuff with those ESP8266 based boards.

    They're trying everything they can to deliberately sabotage any attempt to use them in security research.

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