Smartphone to Smartwatch Communication Open to Hacking Attacks

From carrier data to social networking sites notifications, everything that is transmitted from smartphone to smartwatch is prone to piece of cake hacking attempts, discovers a security firm.

Insecure smartphone to smartwatch communication:

Wearables take been designed to completely mirror our lives on smartphones. From app data to emails and SMS, every notification is sent out to smartwatches for piece of cake and prompt admission. Nonetheless, is that information secure? While tech giant like Facebook, Twitter, Google and others take increased security measures over the years, have OEMs designed this communication secure plenty or is it putting our data at take chances?

Romania-based security firm Bitdefender discovered in a research that with "a piffling ingenuity and some open up-source tools,' information technology is quite piece of cake to hack into the smartphone to smartwatch communication and access everything in plain-text. Security researchers have released a proof-of-concept video where they have demonstrated how easily can a cyber criminal hack into the data transmission between smartphone and a vesture. The tapping is possible as Bluetooth communication between the ii devices depends on the security of a six-digit pin. Using brute-force technique, hacker could easily expose entire communications and conversations in plain text.

Over-the-air Bluetooth encryption is handled by the baseband co-processor, built into most Android devices. Previous enquiry has proven that this baseband co-processor can be tampered with via over-the-air updates.

Our research involved analyzing the raw traffic before being sent over the air via the baseband co-processor. This means that relying but on baseband co-processors to handle the encryption is not a fool-proof security mechanism. Information technology too raises the question of how easy it is for someone to update the firmware on the baseband co-processor one time a vulnerability is disclosed.

Devices / Os used in this research:

Nexus 4
Samsung Gear Live
Android 50 Developer Preview

Bitdefender suggests using Near Field Advice (NFC) to safely transmit data and pin lawmaking from smartphone to smartwatch. All the same, as pointed out in the report likewise, it may have an touch on battery due to an additional layer of encryption.

-You tin can access the consummate report and details here