Cross-protocol attacks: Weaponizing a smartphone by diverting its bluetooth controller

Abstract

In this paper, we focus on a new type of wireless attacks, named cross-technology pivoting attacks. The main objective of these attacks is to divert the transceivers of compromised devices dedicated to a given protocol to allow them to communicate through another protocol, taking advantage of some similarities in their modulation schemes. The main contribution of this work consists in demonstrating the practical feasibility of pivoting attacks from off-the-shelf devices implementing the Bluetooth 5.0 specification. To our knowledge, this attack has not been explored so far in the state of the art.