BlueSWAT: A Lightweight State-Aware Security Framework for Bluetooth Low Energy

TL;DR

BlueSWAT is a lightweight, state-aware security framework that detects session-based attacks on BLE devices by monitoring connection states, effectively mitigating most attacks with minimal performance impact across various IoT devices.

Contribution

It introduces a novel state machine-based inspection method combined with a lightweight eBPF framework for cross-device BLE security without rebooting.

Findings

Mitigates 76.1% of session-based BLE attacks

Works across diverse devices and stacks

Imposes negligible memory and latency overhead

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is a short-range wireless communication technology for resource-constrained IoT devices. Unfortunately, BLE is vulnerable to session-based attacks, where previous packets construct exploitable conditions for subsequent packets to compromise connections. Defending against session-based attacks is challenging because each step in the attack sequence is legitimate when inspected individually. In this paper, we present BlueSWAT, a lightweight state-aware security framework for protecting BLE devices. To perform inspection on the session level rather than individual packets, BlueSWAT leverages a finite state machine (FSM) to monitor sequential actions of connections at runtime. Patterns of session-based attacks are modeled as malicious transition paths in the FSM. To overcome the heterogeneous IoT environment, we develop a lightweight eBPF framework to facilitate universal patch distribution across different BLE architectures and stacks, without requiring device reboot. We implement BlueSWAT on 5 real-world devices with different chips and stacks to demonstrate its cross-device adaptability. On our dataset with 101 real-world BLE vulnerabilities, BlueSWAT can mitigate 76.1% of session-based attacks, outperforming other defense frameworks. In our end-to-end application evaluation, BlueSWAT patches introduce an average of 0.073% memory overhead and negligible latency.