“Partner Project- Bluetooth Vulnerability”

Mobile phones and Laptops are more apart of are world today then ever. A survey by CTIA of wireless carriers revealed that over 285 million Americans are mobile subscribers, about 91 percent of the total population. We want to take a look at how secure mobile phones really are. If so many citizens use mobile phones what could happen if cell phone’s data wasn’t as secure as we once thought. Our research shows that bluetooth technology is the most used means of attempting security breaches. Bluetooth is an open wireless technology standard for exchanging data over short distances (using short wavelength radio transmissions) from fixed and mobile devices, creating personal area networks (PANs) with high levels of security.

Despite this security, the wireless nature of bluetooth means that the signals being sent through the air can be intercepted by others. A would-be attacker could connect a bluetooth monitor and mouse to your pc to take control and steal your data, or someone could hack into the connection between your mobile phone and bluetooth headset to listen in on your conversation. There are also ways that attackers can spoof the identity of a particular device, to take its place in a bluetooth connection. To combat these risks, bluetooth was designed with several security measures in place. Generally when you connect two devices, you need to input a PIN on both. This sets up a secured connection between the two. One other hacking technique that gets around this is called “bluesnarfing” which can apparently allow hackers to silently access a mobile phone’s contacts, calendars, and pictures. There is at least one worm that attempts to spread itself via bluetooth, and DoS (Denial of Service) attacks are also possible. So in short, there are a lot of vulnerabilities of the bluetooth architecture. (Source- http://ntrg.cs.tcd.ie/undergrad/4ba2.05/group15/index.html)

To start are study we went to three location and attempted to see which of these PAN networks were accessible to use given that we knew there password. In each location with at least 20 or so students (most with phones and laptops) that we could see there PAN network was visible and assisible. We then wanted to conduct a survey to poll people’s knowledge of bluetooth technology and mobile phone security. In are survey we found that most subjects barely even knew what bluetooth technology was. Most had seen the bluetooth symbol on there wireless devices but didn’t know much about how to turn it off or what implications it had. After we informed the subjets that bluetooth technology could possibly lead to a security break most felt they would be more careful in the future.