Breaking Fitness Records without Moving: Reverse Engineering and Spoofing Fitbit

Breaking Fitness Records without Moving: Reverse Engineering and Spoofing Fitbit. Fereidooni, H., Classen, J., Spink, T., Patras, P., Miettinen, M., Sadeghi, A., Hollick, M., & Conti, M. arXiv:1706.09165 [cs], June, 2017. arXiv: 1706.09165

Paper abstract bibtex

Tens of millions of wearable ﬁtness trackers are shipped yearly to consumers who routinely collect information about their exercising patterns. Smartphones push this health-related data to vendors’ cloud platforms, enabling users to analyze summary statistics on-line and adjust their habits. Third-parties including health insurance providers now oﬀer discounts and ﬁnancial rewards in exchange for such private information and evidence of healthy lifestyles. Given the associated monetary value, the authenticity and correctness of the activity data collected becomes imperative. In this paper, we provide an in-depth security analysis of the operation of ﬁtness trackers commercialized by Fitbit, the wearables market leader. We reveal an intricate security through obscurity approach implemented by the user activity synchronization protocol running on the devices we analyze. Although non-trivial to interpret, we reverse engineer the message semantics, demonstrate how falsiﬁed user activity reports can be injected, and argue that based on our discoveries, such attacks can be performed at scale to obtain ﬁnancial gains. We further document a hardware attack vector that enables circumvention of the end-to-end protocol encryption present in the latest Fitbit ﬁrmware, leading to the spooﬁng of valid encrypted ﬁtness data. Finally, we give guidelines for avoiding similar vulnerabilities in future system designs.

@article{fereidooni_breaking_2017,
	title = {Breaking {Fitness} {Records} without {Moving}: {Reverse} {Engineering} and {Spoofing} {Fitbit}},
	shorttitle = {Breaking {Fitness} {Records} without {Moving}},
	url = {http://arxiv.org/abs/1706.09165},
	abstract = {Tens of millions of wearable ﬁtness trackers are shipped yearly to consumers who routinely collect information about their exercising patterns. Smartphones push this health-related data to vendors’ cloud platforms, enabling users to analyze summary statistics on-line and adjust their habits. Third-parties including health insurance providers now oﬀer discounts and ﬁnancial rewards in exchange for such private information and evidence of healthy lifestyles. Given the associated monetary value, the authenticity and correctness of the activity data collected becomes imperative. In this paper, we provide an in-depth security analysis of the operation of ﬁtness trackers commercialized by Fitbit, the wearables market leader. We reveal an intricate security through obscurity approach implemented by the user activity synchronization protocol running on the devices we analyze. Although non-trivial to interpret, we reverse engineer the message semantics, demonstrate how falsiﬁed user activity reports can be injected, and argue that based on our discoveries, such attacks can be performed at scale to obtain ﬁnancial gains. We further document a hardware attack vector that enables circumvention of the end-to-end protocol encryption present in the latest Fitbit ﬁrmware, leading to the spooﬁng of valid encrypted ﬁtness data. Finally, we give guidelines for avoiding similar vulnerabilities in future system designs.},
	language = {en},
	urldate = {2020-05-20},
	journal = {arXiv:1706.09165 [cs]},
	author = {Fereidooni, Hossein and Classen, Jiska and Spink, Tom and Patras, Paul and Miettinen, Markus and Sadeghi, Ahmad-Reza and Hollick, Matthias and Conti, Mauro},
	month = jun,
	year = {2017},
	note = {arXiv: 1706.09165},
	keywords = {Computer Science - Cryptography and Security}
}

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