RSSI-based attacks for identification of BLE devices
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
To prevent tracking, the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol integrates privacy mechanisms such as address randomization. However, as highlighted by previous researches address randomization is not a silver bullet and can be circumvented by exploiting other types of information disclosed by the protocol such as counters or timing. In this work, we propose two novel attack to break address randomization in BLE exploiting side information in the form of Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI). More precisely, we demonstrate how RSSI measurements, extracted from received BLE advertising packets, can be used to link together the traces emitted by the same device or directly re-identify it despite address randomization. The proposed attacks leverage the distribution of RSSI to create a fingerprint of devices with an empirical evaluation on various scenarios demonstrating their effectiveness. For instance in the static context, in which devices remain at the same position, the proposed approach yields a re-identification accuracy of up to 97%, which can even be boosted to perfect accuracy by increasing the number of receivers controlled by the adversary. We also discuss the factors influencing the success of the attacks and evaluate two possible countermeasures whose effectiveness is limited, highlighting the difficulty in mitigating this threat.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it