A Practical Bluetooth Traffic Sniffing System: Design, Implementation, and Countermeasure

With the prevalence of personal Bluetooth devices, potential breach of user privacy has been an increasing concern. To date, sniffing Bluetooth traffic has been widely considered an extremely intricate task due to Bluetooth’s indiscoverable mode, vendor-dependent adaptive hopping behavior, and the interference in the open 2.4 GHz band. In this paper, we present BlueEar –a practical Bluetooth traffic sniffer. BlueEar features a novel dual-radio architecture where two Bluetooth-compliant radios coordinate with each other on learning the hopping sequence of indiscoverable Bluetooth networks, predicting adaptive hopping behavior, and mitigating the impacts of RF interference. We built a prototype of BlueEar to sniff on Bluetooth classic traffic. Experiment results show that BlueEar can maintain a packet capture rate higher than 90% consistently in real-world environments, where the target Bluetooth network exhibits diverse hopping behaviors in the presence of dynamic interference from coexisting 802.11 devices. In addition, we discuss the privacy implications of the BlueEar system, and present a practical countermeasure that effectively reduces the packet capture rate of the sniffer to 20%. The proposed countermeasure can be easily implemented on Bluetooth master devices while requiring no modification to slave devices such as keyboards and headsets.