The detection of physical attacks against iBeacon transmitters

Abstract

iBeacon is a new technology proposed by Apple using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), which helps mobile devices understand their position on a micro-local scale, and facilitates the delivery of location-based content to mobile users. According to the iBeacon protocol, iBeacon transmitters only do one-way broadcast communication, and thus it is difficult to authenticate the legitimacy of the transmitters. In this paper, we focus on detecting the physical attacks against iBeacon transmitters- iBeacon transmitters can be stolen, tampered, faked and reused, which interfere with the legitimate iBeacon transmission, reduce the quality of service and ultimately degrade the user experience. We develop a detection system based on Hidden Markov Model running on the server-side to detect the misbehaving iBeacon transmitters without more energy consuming. Our system achieves 85% detection accuracy on average for all physical attack actions; meanwhile it has a 5% false alarm rate for non-attack situations in our designated trace experiments, and 100% correct binary judgements in the random-trace experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that focuses on the iBeacon physical attack problem.