Survey of Vehicle IoT Bluetooth Devices

Abstract

Modern vehicles equipped with wireless technologies such as Bluetooth can basically be considered mobile IoT devices. Users can connect their smart phones to their cars to for example use the car's speakers and microphones to make phone calls or read out various diagnostics data from the car such as engine speed and coolant temperature. However, to provide high usability and also often due to limitations in physical input/output capabilities of Bluetooth devices, there may be errors in the implementations where Bluetooth security features are not fully utilized for the pairing procedure. For example, attackers can target vehicle IoT devices using fixed unchangeable PINs that are always in discoverable mode and pair with such devices by guessing the PINs. If these devices are connected to the in-vehicle network, an attacker in control of such a device could execute attacks by injecting arbitrary messages into the in-vehicle network. These attacks could have serious consequences on human life as they can affect the safety of the car. Therefore, it is imperative to provide proper security measures for vehicle IoT devices that provide a potential entry point to the in-vehicle network.