RSSI-based attacks for identification of BLE devices
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".