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  4. BreakMi: Reversing, Exploiting and Fixing Xiaomi Fitness Tracking Ecosystem
 
research article

BreakMi: Reversing, Exploiting and Fixing Xiaomi Fitness Tracking Ecosystem

Casagrande, Marco
•
Losiouk, Eleonora
•
Conti, Mauro
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June 8, 2022
IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems

Xiaomi is the leading company in the fitness tracking industry. Successful attacks on its fitness tracking ecosystem would result in severe consequences, including the loss of sensitive health and personal data. Despite these relevant risks, we know very little about the security mechanisms adopted by Xiaomi. In this work, we uncover them and show that they are insecure. In particular, Xiaomi protects its fitness tracking ecosystem with custom application-layer protocols spoken over insecure Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) connections (ignoring standard BLE security mechanisms already supported by their devices) and TLS connections. We identify severe vulnerabilities affecting such proprietary protocols, including unilateral and replayable authentication. Those issues are critical as they affect all Xiaomi trackers released since 2016 and up-to-date Xiaomi companion apps for Android and iOS. We show in practice how to exploit the identified vulnerabilities by presenting six impactful attacks. Four attacks enable to wirelessly impersonate any Xiaomi fitness tracker and companion app, man-in-the-middle (MitM) them, and eavesdrop on their communication. The other two attacks leverage a malicious Android application to remotely eavesdrop on data from a tracker and impersonate a Xiaomi fitness app. Overall, the attacks have a high impact as they can be used to exfiltrate and inject sensitive data from any Xiaomi tracker and compatible app. We propose five practical and low-overhead countermeasures to mitigate the presented vulnerabilities. Moreover, we present breakmi, a modular toolkit that we developed to automate our reverse-engineering process and attacks. breakmi understands Xiaomi application-layer proprietary protocols, reimplements Xiaomi security mechanisms, and automatically performs our attacks. We demonstrate that our toolkit can be generalized by extending it to be compatible with the Fitbit ecosystem. We will open-source breakmi.

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Type
research article
DOI
10.46586/tches.v2022.i3.330-366
Scopus ID

2-s2.0-85134696606

Author(s)
Casagrande, Marco

EURECOM Ecole d'Ingénieur et Centre de Recherche en Sciences du Numérique

Losiouk, Eleonora

Università degli Studi di Padova

Conti, Mauro

Università degli Studi di Padova

Payer, Mathias  

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne

Antonioli, Daniele

EURECOM Ecole d'Ingénieur et Centre de Recherche en Sciences du Numérique

Date Issued

2022-06-08

Published in
IACR Transactions on Cryptographic Hardware and Embedded Systems
Volume

2022

Issue

3

Start page

330

End page

366

Subjects

Bluetooth Low Energy

•

Fitness Tracker

•

IoT

•

Reverse Engineering

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
HEXHIVE  
FunderFunding(s)Grant NumberGrant URL

DARPA

HR001119S0089-AMP-FP-034

European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation program

850868

European Research Council

Available on Infoscience
April 4, 2025
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/248563
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