Security News New BLEEDINGBIT Vulnerabilities Affect Widely-Used Bluetooth Chips

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https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/new-bleedingbit-vulnerabilities-affect-widely-used-bluetooth-chips/

Two vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth chips typically found in access points that provide WiFi service in enterprises allow attackers to take control of the devices without authentication or to breach the network.

The vulnerable chips are also present in medical devices (insulin pumps, pacemakers), smart locks and a variety of other types of products that rely on Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology for communication. A tally of affected gadgets is currently unavailable.

Researchers at Armis security company for IoT devices discovered the flaws in the BLE chips from Texas Instruments (TI) and gave them the collective name BLEEDINGBIT.
Specific products known to embed the faulty TI BLE chips are WiFi network equipment from Cisco, Meraki (acquired by Cisco Systems in December 2012), and Aruba Networks (subsidiary of Hewlett-Packard). Together, the three brands sell at least 70% of the access points that end up in enterprises every year.

BLEEDINGBIT remote code execution CVE-2018-16986

Tracked as CVE-2018-16986, one of the issues can be leveraged to trigger a memory corruption in the BLE stack, offering an unauthenticated attacker the opportunity to take full control of the system.

"The vulnerability can be exploited by an attacker in the vicinity of the affected device, provided its BLE is turned on, without any other prerequisites or knowledge about the device," Armis says in a report shared with BleepingComputer.

BLEEDINGBIT remote code execution CVE-2018-7080

The second BLEEDINGBIT bug is a backdoor that helps during the development stage to push over-the-air downloads (OAD) of the firmware. The function is intended for updating the devices remotely by connecting to them with a preset password.