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Bluetooth provides encryption, authentication, and integrity protection of its connections. These protection mechanisms require that Bluetooth devices initially establish trust on first use through a process called pairing. Throughout this process, multiple alternative pairing methods are supported.In this paper, we describe a design flaw in the pairing mechanism of Bluetooth. This flaw permits two devices to perform pairing using differing methods. While successfully interacting with each other, the devices are not aware of the Method Confusion. We explain how an attacker can cause and abuse this Method Confusion to mount a Method Confusion Attack. In contrast to other attacks targeting the pairing method, our attack applies even in Bluetooth’s highest security mode and cannot be mitigated in the protocol. Through the Method Confusion Attack, an adversary can infiltrate the secured connection between the victims and intercept all traffic.Our attack is successful in practically relevant scenarios. We implemented it as an end-to-end Proof of Concept for Bluetooth Low Energy and tested it with off-the-shelf smartphones, a smartwatch and a banking device. Furthermore, we performed a user study where none of the 40 participants noticed the ongoing attack, and 37 (92.5%) of the users completed the pairing process. Finally, we propose changes to the Bluetooth specification that immunize it against our attack.

To secure mobile devices, such as laptops and smartphones, against unauthorized physical data access, employing Full Disk Encryption (FDE) is a popular defense. This technique is effective if the device is always shut down when unattended. However, devices are often suspended instead of switched off. This leaves confidential data such as the FDE key, passphrases and user data in RAM which may be read out using cold boot, JTAG or DMA attacks. These attacks can be mitigated by encrypting the main memory during suspend. While this approach seems promising, it is not implemented on Windows or Linux. We present FridgeLock to add memory encryption on suspend to Linux. Our implementation as a Linux Kernel Module (LKM) does not require an admin to recompile the kernel. Using Dynamic Kernel Module Support (DKMS) allows for easy and fast deployment on existing Linux systems, where the distribution provides a prepackaged kernel and kernel updates. We tested our module on a range of 4.19 to 5.3 kernels and experienced a low performance impact, sustaining the system's usability. We hope that our tool leads to a more detailed evaluation of memory encryption in real world usage scenarios.

With the increasing use of Ethernet-based communication backbones in safety-critical real-time domains, both efficient and predictable interfacing and cryptographically secure authentication of high-speed data streams are becoming very important. Although the increasing data rates of in-vehicle networks allow the integration of more demanding (e.g., camera-based) applications, processing speeds and, in particular, memory bandwidths are no longer scaling accordingly. The need for authentication, on the other hand, stems from the ongoing convergence of traditionally separated functional domains and the extended connectivity both in- (e.g., smart-phones) and outside (e.g., telemetry, cloud-based services and vehicle-to-X technologies) current vehicles. The inclusion of cryptographic measures thus requires careful interface design to meet throughput, latency, safety, security and power constraints given by the particular application domain. Over the last decades, this has forced system designers to not only optimize their software stacks accordingly, but also incrementally move interface functionalities from software to hardware. This paper discusses existing and emerging methods for dealing with high-speed data streams ranging from software-only via mixed-hardware/software approaches to fully hardware-based solutions. In particular, we introduce two approaches to acquire and authenticate GigE Vision Video Streams at full line rate of Gigabit Ethernet on Programmable SoCs suitable for future heterogeneous automotive processing platforms.