Bluetooth Low Energy Security Testing with Combinatorial Methods

Learn about a novel approach to Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) security testing through this 16-minute conference presentation from USENIX ATC '25. Discover how researchers from SBA Research enhanced traditional fuzzing methods by implementing Combinatorial Security Testing (CST) to achieve guaranteed input space coverage when testing BLE protocol vulnerabilities. Explore the challenges of testing wireless protocols like BLE due to Host Controller Interface (HCI) abstraction levels and understand how the research team developed a systematic testing framework using custom firmware. Examine the evaluation results from testing 10 different BLE devices across various firmware versions, which identified 19 distinct security issues and replicated previous research findings while uncovering additional faults. Gain insights into the performance comparison between the new combinatorial testing approach and traditional fuzzing methods, including execution time analysis and fault detection capabilities. Understand the significance of this work for IoT device security, given that BLE vulnerabilities can potentially affect millions of connected devices in ubiquitous computing environments.