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Security of bluetooth low energy Internet of Things devices
Thesis   Open access

Security of bluetooth low energy Internet of Things devices

Zachary Thornton
Master of Science (M.S.), Drexel University
Jun 2023
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.17918/00001668
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Abstract

Cyber intelligence (Computer security) Computer Security
The goal of this work was to better understand the state of security in Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Internet of Things (IoT) devices. This was accomplished by creating malicious code and testing a few known attacks. Code was created to attempt a denial of service (DoS) attack on an IoT gateway, and malware was developed to exfiltrate data. The malware was designed for two functions. First, it read data being sent to the gateway via a BLE IoT sensor. Afterwards, it choose whether or not to exfiltrate it based on a user defined parameter. A detector was also built to measure the malware's effectiveness in stealthy operation. The effectiveness of the detector was then compared against the percentage of exfiltrated data. The results of the DoS attacks showed difficulty in successfully performing them, whereas the results for the exfiltration malware show that at low percentages of data exfiltration, detection is difficult. After a small amount of exfiltration (about 4%) however, detection accuracy dramatically increases by almost 40%. This is likely due to how easy it is to detect anomalous behavior when a benign system is relatively quiet or consistent in operations.

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