Bridging The Gap: Data Exfiltration In Highly Secured Environments Using Bluetooth IoTs

IoT devices introduce unprecedented threats into home and professional networks. As they fail to adhere to security best practices, they are broadly exploited by malicious actors to build botnets or steal sensitive information. Their adoption challenges established security standard as classic security measures are often inappropriate to secure them. This is even more problematic in sensitive environments where the presence of insecure IoTs can be exploited to bypass strict security policies. In this paper, we demonstrate an attack against a highly secured network using a Bluetooth smart bulb. This attack allows a malicious actor to take advantage of a smart bulb to exfiltrate data from an air gapped network.

I. Introduction

The massive adoption of IoT devices lead to new security challenges. Indeed, those devices are designed to lower the time to market and neglect most of the security recommendations and best practices. When installed in a highly secured environment containing sensitive data, their use is even more problematic. Their presence creates security holes and threatens the network as their security level is often below requirements. For instance, the Mirai botnet [1] is one example of security incidents introduced by the world wide adoption of insecure IoTs. Multiple studies have focused on different strategies to create communication mediums using IoTs to covertly exfiltrate data. For example, by using high frequency light variations on light bulbs [2].