On practical selective jamming of Bluetooth Low Energy advertising

Abstract

Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Advertising is an important component of BLE as it is used to broadcast connection information to other devices nearby, usually smartphones. Furthermore, it is the foundation of a variety of services, such as indoor localization. We present a selective jammer against BLE beacons. The jammer selectively jams only BLE advertising beacons for which it was configured (API) on just the BLE advertising channels actually being used (narrowband). Such a jammer is hard to detect and hence requires a sophisticated Intrusion Detection System (IDS). The prototypic implementation uses off-the-shelf embedded hardware which is low-cost, small-size and very power efficient. Experiment results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed solution and reveal the impact of the distance between jammer and receiver on the advertising success rate. At short distances the jammer is able to successfully corrupt all BLE advertisement beacon frames making the BLE beacon source undiscoverable.