Car Bluetooth distrupt

Sub-GHz
#1

Hello, I’ve recently placed an order for the Flipper Zero device, which should be arriving soon. The reason I placed this order is that I want to disrupt the Bluetooth connections of vehicles playing very loud music as they pass by my house. What I’m looking to do beyond disrupting the connection is to gain access to the audio system of these noisy vehicles and play something else to disturb them further.

I’m not asking how to achieve this; rather, I’m wondering if it’s technically feasible and if anyone has worked on something similar.

#2

It is hard to generalize this.

Some car entertainment systems got an infrared eye. This will be easy to control. But not fast.
And a lot car windows are blocking IR.

If the remote is via steering wheel control, you don’t have any vector.

If it is Bluetooth, you need to get a pairing. You can’t force it to pair from outside, even if some car radios are in pairing mode after starting the motor for roundabout 3 to 5 minutes. And you need additional hardware, bluetooth is out of scope at the flipper.

Just generally speaking, maybe there are even more vectors. But not very flipper friendly at all.

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#3

Bluetooth protocol is pretty secure and reliable, preventing outsiders from misbehaving (exception: RF-jamming the whole band. I don’t think Flipper’s hardware can do it).
But, Bluetooth implementations are historically full of bugs and vulnerabilities. If you know a specific device in use, running some exploit against it is way more plausible.

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#4

The wifi devboard has some options so it can operate on 2,4ghz band but for this specific purpose a laptop with Bluetooth would be more easy i guess? but then again comes the question? are you targeting a specific audio device, a static one in the neighborhood, or are you just trying to jam a band? Generating noise so a connection drops is a pretty barbaric way of attacking devices, but also easy to solve with a usb stick, so not sure how disruption of BT would solve the potential problem, except for 2 minutes maybe. But from personal experience , a lot of stupid devices pause playback when a new device connects or accepts new connections when playback is not being used , like tons of soundbars etc. If you are really specific on attacking Bluetooth devices there are other things you might wanna look into before using the flipper for this purpose, where the devboard has features if you do not bother going into different firmware’s and doing some own tinkering with the board , but i would look into tools on the Bluetooth protocol/driver area on other devices first. if you just want something to play with and make it work, yes its gonna be a fun time to give the board some purpose and learn about the features of the protocol. If you just wanted to generate noise a china jammer would be cheaper i guess :slightly_smiling_face: or even cheaper a half broken microwave from the late 70’s that has chubby transformers that could cook water from 5 yards away on 3kw, if you wanna take jamming next-level, think big :smiley: but in normal residential area’s except a handful of countries the limitation on noise levels is still ~300-500mw? ish?

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#5

@Sir_Fap_A_Lot , @LupusE

thanks for replies.

In the area where I live, there is a main road passing in front of us. This highway is approximately 100 meters away from us. Due to drivers passing by here with loud music, they wake up my two daughters, one of them is 3 years old and the other is 9 months old, and they also give us sleepless nights. I wanted to theoretically acquire information on whether I could increase the Bluetooth range by using additional hardware on the Flipper Zero side and do something like this. Thank you for the information you provided. I was planning to use Flipper Zero more for conducting some tests in my own workplace. Also, I would have been very happy if I could perform this operation :slight_smile:

#6

Well put. RF Jamming is not a good idea. To jam Bluetooth would mean jamming MANY other devices. That frequency is often referred to as the ISM band. Industrial Scientific and Medical. I will say there are in fact medical devices on that band including insulin pumps and pacemakers. Well I don’t think jamming would damage those devices or cause a severe malfunction I would not be the one to test it out. On a more practical note the local internet provider will come looking if that band is jammed regularly and neighbors start to complain. When money is involved the FCC and their counterparts tend to take those complaints seriously. It’s usually a simple warning if it was accidental but if it’s on purpose large fines may be involved.

There is one currently known Bluetooth flaw the Flipper can employ but it only pops a notification up and likely won’t stop the music. Also it only works on IOS and requires close proximity.

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#7

Correct information, but BT jamming would lead to connection loss, if the car entertainment was linked to the BT enabled mobile.
Due to caching I would expect the driver wouldn’t notice at Drive-By that the connection is jammed.

So beside from “don’t do this, you could get in jail” (really!), this won’t help for this particular problem.

2 Likes
#8

At best it would be a brief hiccup in the sound. The old Bluetooth devices were very susceptible to interference in my experience. I remember a time when I would switch to 5.8ghz WiFi because I could not keep a reliable Bluetooth connection. The 2.4ghz WiFi interfered was too much for some old devices but that was a very long time ago. These days Bluetooth does quite well in noisy environments.

#9

Yeah making noise to prevent noise just doing it on another spectrum seems counterproductive, but if you want to learn more about the protocols, features the wifi devboard with the esp32 can be fun if you are bored, but i do not think it would be a good start for attacking bypassing devices anyways, by the time the device understand you try to connect they are out of range again. The other way around, wardriving was a popular thing in the past, so i guess there still is a niche market? :smiley: didn’t the denial of service-dog and deauth kitty make the pineapple wifi popular in the first place? :slight_smile:

#10

I think your best way will be to remove the road. Either by complaining to officials, or with a lot of C4 :boom:.

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#11

Thinking in solutions +1 , but just like using jamming to disrupt communications there might be some attention of government officials causing some kind of problems for you and again , I think the jail time on crafting plastic explosives to get rid of a piece of road is even worse.

#12

There was an April Fool a few years back how to EMP music rowdy on a parking space with a modified microwave … unfortunately I can’t find the (German) article anymore.

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#13

There are some interesting things you can do with the magnetron out of a microwave. I have seen a few people use them to power led lights wirelessly. You probably couldn’t fry any circuitry but you could definitely cause some interference. With some luck and very close proximity maybe even glitch some computer circuitry.

The EMP devices I’m aware of used for testing are grid powered and pretty big.

I did get to test the Bluetooth spam app that works on IOS. It was a lot of fun using it on people I know but it’s only a minor annoyance. It wouldn’t stop any loud music. It was a funny party trick. :rofl: All my sister’s family have iPhones. They figured out I was doing (not that I was hiding it).

#14

the old handmade antenna swirl ones to jerk around with gambling machines and tricking it into adding credits, i think they where mostly just high volt high amp setups with custom antenna’s to try to jerk with electronics, if you do not care about breaking stuff and expect some damage when turning some knobs over 11, it can be really cool to play with, but like many other machines, a lot of electronics run on smoke. once it escapes you will need a new one.

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