Unnamed Reverse Engineering Podcast · 3 Jun 2018 · 45m
Bluetooth security researcher Mike Ryan, founder of Ice 9 Consulting, discusses his journey from hacking Game Boy ROMs to exposing critical vulnerabilities in Bluetooth products, including Boosted Skateboards and Fuse credit cards. He explains how developers often fail by implementing custom cryptography or ignoring threat models, such as the risk of a credit card being handed to a waiter, leading to data exposure. Ryan advocates for using built-in BLE security and provides a detailed workflow for reverse engineering using tools like Ubertooth, Wireshark, and CrackLE to analyze protocol flaws and pairing weaknesses.
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Hosts Elecia White and Christopher White discuss listener emails covering Bluetooth 4.2 security, the definition of masked ROM, and the use of the volatile keyword in C. They review Elecia's work on precision mice feeders and bike lights, and detail their disassembly of BB-8 robots for competitive analysis of their BLE and inertial sensors. The episode concludes with commentary on Amazon's work culture and drone regulations.
Sandeep Kamath, CEO and founder of SwaraLink Technologies, explains how his company helps developers build high-quality Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) products by abstracting away the complexity of the Bluetooth stack. He details common pitfalls such as poor battery life, unreliable connections, and security vulnerabilities that arise when developers rely solely on raw SDKs from chip vendors like Nordic Semiconductor and Silicon Labs. Kamath advocates for using middleware platforms to ensure seamless user experiences, robust security against unauthorized connections, and support for over-the-air (OTA) firmware updates throughout the product lifecycle.
Jen Castillo, a firmware engineer at Rebelbot, discusses the critical security and privacy challenges in wearable computing, using her company's 'Item' watch as a case study. She highlights the inadequacy of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) security, the risks of cloud data storage, and the ethical implications of monetizing user health data. Castillo also references the Nymi band's biometric authentication and suggests HIPAA guidelines as a useful checklist for non-medical devices.
Matt Brown of Brown Find Security discusses hardware security best practices and reverse engineering techniques, using his analysis of a smart charcoal smoker as a primary case study. He explains how unencrypted flash storage and lack of key rotation on an ESP32-based device allowed him to extract private keys and intercept TLS traffic. The conversation covers the importance of threat modeling, the role of secure elements like the ATECC608, and the tools used for firmware dumping and RF analysis.
Josh Bleecher Snyder, Director of Software Engineering at PayPal, discusses the development of PayPal Beacon, a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) hardware device for merchant check-ins, and his prior work at Card.io on mobile computer vision. He details the engineering challenges of using BLE for always-on presence, the security architecture involving cryptographic signatures between the beacon, merchant phone, and PayPal servers, and the decision to use the Go programming language for its concurrency and developer experience. Snyder also covers the transition from founding Card.io to working at a large enterprise, highlighting the cultural shift and the use of tools like Docker and Theano for machine learning.
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