PARALLEL DATA LAB 

PDL Abstract

A Survey of Security Vulnerabilities in Bluetooth Low Energy Beacons

Carnegie Mellon University Parallel Data Lab Technical Report CMU-PDL-16-109. November 2016.

Hui Jun Tay, Jiaqi Tan, Priya Narasimhan

Carnegie Mellon University

http://www.pdl.cmu.edu/

There are currently 4 million Bluetooth Low Energy beacons, such as Apple’s iBeacons™, deployed worldwide, with more being used in an increasingly wide variety of fields, from marketing to navigation. Yet, there is a lack of focus on the impact of security on beacon deployments. This report looks to capture an overview of current beacon deployments, the current vulnerabilities and risks present in using such platforms, and the security measures taken by vendors today.

KEYWORDS: Bluetooth Low Energy, BLE, Security, iBeacon

FULL TR: pdf