A team of security researchers has discovered a critical security vulnerability in the Bluetooth wireless communication protocol, which leaves millions of devices vulnerable to attack.
Daniele Antonioli from Singapore University of Technology and Design, ο Nils Ole Tippenhauer από το CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and Kasper Rasmussen from the Department of Computer Science University of Oxford published a paper titled “The KNOB is Broken: Exploiting Low Entropy in the Encryption Key Negotiation Of Bluetooth BR/EDR, ”Where they reveal a new big security gap of Bluetooth.
According to researchers, the new vulnerability in Bluetooth could leave millions of devices using the protocol exposed to a new kind of attack called KNOB (originally from Key Negotiation Of Bluetooth). The attack allows attackers to bypass the Bluetooth pairing process and spy on data shared between different devices, even if paired.
The official KNOB website states:
The KNOB attack is possible because of flaws in the Bluetooth specification. Therefore, any compatible Bluetooth device may be vulnerable. We have performed KNOB attacks on more than 17 unique Bluetooth chips (on 24 different devices), so far. We were able to test chips from manufacturers Broadcom, Qualcomm, Apple, Intel and Chicony. All devices we tested were vulnerable to the KNOB attack
It appears to be a major security gap that affects all Bluetooth enabled devices.
So the researchers had to coordinate the release with the manufacturers Companies, to give them time to fix the bug and release the necessary security updates to users. The security flaw was disclosed in November 2018 and has been documented as CVE-2019-9506.
Apple, Intel and Microsoft have already released the necessary update that fixes the vulnerability of Bluetooth.
However, security researchers warn that if your device has not been updated by the end of 2018, it is vulnerable.
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