Researchers at UC San Diego have learned how to track individual Bluetooth signals. This poses a privacy and security risk, but the tracking is not 100% accurate across all devices.
How Hackers Hack Your Phone Using Bluetooth
A recently published paper from security researchers at UC San Diego explains that Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is not as secure as once thought. It turns out that despite the encryption measures built into BLE, it often produces a unique signal that can still be found and tracked.
BLE is intended to allow devices to use consistent wireless communication connections, with much lower power consumption than regular Bluetooth. Think of wireless speakers or earphones, AirDrop, etc.
The recently discovered caveat is that devices that use BLE (such as a smartphone) often have imperfections in the signal, which can act as a kind of fingerprint. Someone with a software-defined radio (SDR) could pick up a BLE signal and then potentially identify it by those imperfections.
