Marcel Holtmann

bluetooth classic bypass denial of service information disclosure privilege escalation security vulnerability

Short Bio

Marcel Holtmann is the maintainer and the core developer of the official Linux Bluetooth stack which is called BlueZ. He started working with the Bluetooth technology back in 2001. His work includes new hardware drivers, upper layer protocol implementations and the integration of Bluetooth into other subsystems of the Linux kernel. In January 2004 he overtook the maintainer role from the original developer Max Krasnyansky. Together with Jean Tourrilhes he maintains the OpenOBEX project. He is also responsible for the IrDA and Bluetooth integrations of the Gnokii project.

Marcel left the trifinite.group in 2007!

Marcel's trifinite.stuff

BlueChop

Jan 2006

1 min read

bluetooth classic security vulnerability denial of service

BlueChop is an attack that the disrupts any established bluetooth piconet by means of a device that is not participating the piconet. A precondition for this attack is that the master of the piconet supports multiple connections (a feature that is necessary for building up scatternets).

BlueDump

Jun 2005

1 min read

bluetooth classic security vulnerability denial of service

BlueDumping is the act of causing a Bluetooth device to ‘dump’ it’s stored link key, thereby creating an opportunity for key-exchange sniffing to take place. The attacks on link keys and PINs were first publicised by Ollie Whitehouse, at CanSecWest, in which he describes a method by which the PIN and link-keys can be obtained if a pairing event can be witnessed with a Bluetooth sniffer.

BlueSnarf++

Apr 2005

1 min read

bluetooth classic security vulnerability privilege escalation

BlueSnarf++ is an attack that is very similar to the famous BlueSnarf attack. The main difference is that BlueSnarf++ is an attack where the attacker has full read/write access to the device’s filesystem. The manufacturers of the devices that are known to be vulnerable have been informed about this issue.

BlueBump

Apr 2005

1 min read

bluetooth classic security vulnerability bypass

The BlueBump attack is the Bluetooth equivalent to a very cool physical security thread called key bumping. When used correctly, an appropriate bump key can be used to open any lock in seconds. Since the BlueBump attack is also about keys (link keys in this case) we named this attack after this amazing technique.

BlueSmack

Dec 2004

1 min read

bluetooth classic security vulnerability denial of service

BlueSmack is a Bluetooth attack that knocks out some Bluetooth-enabled devices immediately. This Denial of Service attack can be conducted using standard tools that ship with the official Linux Bluez utils package. Introduction The ‘Ping of Death’ is basically a network ping packet that used to knock out early versions of Microsoft Windows 95.

BlueSnarf

Nov 2003

1 min read

bluetooth classic security vulnerability information disclosure

The BlueSnarf attack is probably the most famous Bluetooth attack, since it is the first major security issue related to Bluetooth enabled devices. BlueSnarf has been identified by Marcel Holtmann in September 2003. Independently, Adam Laurie discovered the same vulneralbility in November 2003 posted the issue on Bugtraq and got in touch with the respective device manufacturers.