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Comment by swores

8 hours ago

I don't have time right now to watch the video and will be coming back to do so later, but here's a couple of snippets from the text on that page that made me want to bother watching (either they're overhyping it, or it sounds interesting and significant)

> The identified vulnerabilities may allow a complete device compromise. We demonstrate the immediate impact using a pair of current-generation headphones. We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral.

> This presentation will give an overview over the vulnerabilities and a demonstration and discussion of their impact. We also generalize these findings and discuss the impact of compromised Bluetooth peripherals in general. At the end, we briefly discuss the difficulties in the disclosure and patching process. Along with the talk, we will release tooling for users to check whether their devices are affected and for other researchers to continue looking into Airoha-based devices.

[...]

> It is important that headphone users are aware of the issues. In our opinion, some of the device manufacturers have done a bad job of informing their users about the potential threats and the available security updates. We also want to provide the technical details to understand the issues and enable other researchers to continue working with the platform. With the protocol it is possible to read and write firmware. This opens up the possibility to patch and potentially customize the firmware.

Here's an excerpt from [1]:

> Step 1: Connect (CVE-20700/20701) The attacker is in physical proximity and silently connects to a pair of headphones via BLE or Classic Bluetooth.

> Step 2: Exfiltrate (CVE-20702) Using the unauthenticated connection, the attacker uses the RACE protocol to (partially) dump the flash memory of the headphones.

> Step 3: Extract Inside that memory dump resides a connection table. This table includes the names and addresses of paired devices. More importantly, it also contains the Bluetooth Link Key. This is the cryptographic secret that a phone and headphones use to recognize and trust each other.

> Note: Once the attacker has this key, they no longer need access to the headphones.

> Step 4: Impersonate The attacker’s device now connects to the targets phone, pretending to be the trusted headphones. This involves spoofing the headphones Bluetooth address and using the extracted link-key.

> Once connected to the phone the attacker can proceed to interact with it from the privileged position of a trusted peripheral.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46454740