  Bluetooth is a short-range wireless technology that provides audio and data
links between personal smartphones and playback devices, such as speakers,
headsets and car entertainment systems. Since its introduction in 2001,
security researchers have suggested that the protocol is weak, and prone to a
variety of attacks against its authentication, link management and encryption
schemes. Key researchers in the field have suggested that reliable passive
sniffing of Bluetooth traffic would enable the practical application of a range
of currently hypothesised attacks. Restricting Bluetooth's frequency hopping
behaviour by manipulation of the available channels, in order to make brute
force attacks more effective has been a frequently proposed avenue of future
research from the literature. This paper has evaluated the proposed approach in
a series of experiments using the software defined radio tools and custom
hardware developed by the Ubertooth project. The work concludes that the
mechanism suggested by previous researchers may not deliver the proposed
improvements, but describes an as yet undocumented interaction between
Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies which may provide a Denial of Service attack
mechanism.
