Earlier this week, I wrote about the Bluetooth weaknesses that would allow someone to drive off with your Tesla:
How to unlock a Tesla that does not belong to you! – Smart Thinking Solutions
Here is a research paper, from UC San Diego, that examines how the cryptographic anonymity that is used for such apps as “COVID-19 contracting tracing” and “find my device”, can be side stepped by looking for unique patterns in the “physical-layer imperfections in the transmissions of specific devices” (Givehchian et al., 2022)
Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices (ucsd.edu)
One of the significant issues raised by this paper is that this type of cryptographic anonymity is used to stop stalkers tracking victims exploiting such devices as Apple AirTags.
References
Givehchian, H., Bhaskar, N., Herrera, E. R., Soto, H. R. L., Dameff, C., Bharadia, D., & Schulman, A. (2022). Evaluating Physical-Layer BLE Location Tracking Attacks on Mobile Devices. IEEE Security and Privacy 2022
