Dear all,
This email is to inform you that my colleague Mathieu, who’s working in our PRIVATICS
Inria team, has three publications
related to WP6.5, all of them accepted for publication. These works have been done in the
context of Guillaume C. PhD,
work supported in part by SPARTA.
All of them will be registered in the French HAL open access archive with the file (when
camera ready will be available),
regardless of the publisher practice.
We have just added them to the official SPARTA-publications-data-management.xlsx file
(it’s committed).
Here is the information:
- PoPETs2020 (
https://www.petsymposium.org/ <https://www.petsymposium.org/>)
"Discontinued Privacy: Personal Data Leaks in Apple Bluetooth-Low-Energy Continuity
Protocols »
Guillaume Celosia, Mathieu Cunche
Abstract:
Apple Continuity protocols are the underlying network component of Apple Continuity
services which allow seamless nearby applications such as activity and file transfer,
device pairing and sharing a network connection. Those protocols rely on Bluetooth Low
Energy (BLE) to exchange information between devices: Apple Continuity messages are
embedded in the payload of BLE advertisement packets that are periodically broadcasted by
devices. Recently, Martin et al. identified [1] a number of privacy issues associated with
Apple Continuity protocols; we show that this was just the tip of the iceberg and that
Apple Continuity protocols leak a wide range of personal information.
In this work, we present a thorough reverse engineering of Apple Continuity protocols that
we use to uncover a collection of privacy leaks. We introduce new artifacts, including
identifiers, counters and battery levels, that can be used for passive tracking, and
describe a novel active tracking attack based on Handoff messages. Beyond tracking issues,
we shed light on severe privacy flaws. First, in addition to the trivial exposure of
device characteristics and status, we found that HomeKit accessories betray human
activities in a smarthome. Then, we demonstrate that AirDrop and Nearby Action protocols
can be leveraged by passive observers to recover email addresses and phone numbers of
users. Finally, we exploit passive observations on the advertising traffic to infer Siri
voice commands of a user.
- IoT S&P 2019 (workshop CCS)
(
https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2019/index.php/ccs-2019-workshops/#WIOTSP
<https://www.sigsac.org/ccs/CCS2019/index.php/ccs-2019-workshops/#WIOTSP>)
"Fingerprinting Bluetooth-Low-Energy Devices Based on the Generic Attribute Profile
»
Guillaume Celosia, Mathieu Cunche
Abstract:
Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a short range wireless technology included in many consumer
devices such as smartphones, earphones and wristbands. As part of the Attribute (ATT)
protocol, discover- able BLE devices expose a data structure called Generic Attribute
(GATT) profile that describes supported features using concepts of services and
characteristics. This profile can be accessed by any device in range and can expose users
to privacy issues.
In this paper, we discuss how the GATT profile can be used to cre- ate a fingerprint that
can be exploited to circumvent anti-tracking features of the BLE standard (i.e. MAC
address randomization). Leveraging a dataset of more than 13000 profiles, we analyze the
potential of this fingerprint and show that it can be used to uniquely identify a number
of devices. We also shed light on several issues where GATT profiles can be mined to infer
sensitive information that can impact privacy of users. Finally, we suggest solutions to
mitigate those issues.
- Mobiquitous 2019 (
http://mobiquitous.org/ <http://mobiquitous.org/>)
"Saving Private Addresses: An Analysis of Privacy Issues in the Bluetooth-Low-Energy
Advertising Mechanism"
Guillaume Celosia, Mathieu Cunche
Abstract:
The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol is being included in a growing number of connected
objects such as fitness trackers and headphones. As part of the service discovery
mechanism of BLE, devices announce themselves by broadcasting radio signals called
advertisement packets that can be collected with off-the-shelf hardware and software. To
avoid the risk of tracking based on those messages, BLE features an address randomization
mechanism that substitutes the device address with random temporary pseudonyms, called
Private addresses.
In this paper, we analyze the privacy issues associated with the advertising mechanism of
BLE, leveraging a large dataset of advertisement packets collected in the wild. First, we
identified that some implementations fail at following the BLE specifications on the
maximum lifetime and the uniform distribution of random identifiers. Furthermore, we found
that the payload of the advertisement packet can hamper the randomization mechanism by
exposing counters and static identifiers. In particular, we discovered that advertising
data of Apple and Microsoft proximity protocols can be used to defeat the address
randomization scheme. Finally, we discuss how some elements of advertising data can be
leveraged to identify the type of device, exposing the owner to inventory attacks.
Best regards,
Vincent, Mathieu, Joost, Thomas