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by Tuna-Fish 2497 days ago
You are not thinking like an attacker.

The attacker has to hit the precisely correct time slot. However, there is no penalty for hitting the wrong time slots, so the easy solution is to just sync the timeslot boundaries by listening once and then retransmit on every timeslot.

The attacker has to somehow prevent the listener from hearing the original transmission. If the attacker retransmits at a similar power, as BT devices usually do, the combined transmission will look like noise. However, the attacker doesn't need to care about things like FCC rules or BT standards, and can simply transmit at a power few order of magnitudes greater, so that what the receiver hears is pretty much just the attacker.

1 comments

There certainly is a penalty for missing time slots (especially if you're trying to overpower the other transmitter). There are two reasons for this: (1) the victim device will have hit the time slot and the pairing process will move into the next stage and (2) packet counters will prevent you from using the same packet in the wrong slot.

Trying to overpower the transmission of the BT peer is certainly the technique to take (although I was hoping not to broadcast that publicly in my original post). You will still have a tough time, however, because you're probably trying to overpower the transmission of two collocated devices (e.g. keyboard+computer) while you are 5-50feet away. In many cases you'll probably end up saturating the receiving antenna. It will be largely a trial-and-error technique, but it will work eventually.

> packet counters will prevent you from using the same packet in the wrong slot.

Source to back up that claim? I am not an expert, but have enough experience on the topic to feel justified in feeling that’s wrong.