Ubertooth Board For Bluetooth Experimentation

Ubertooth Zero is the first offering in [Michael Ossman’s] quest for a Bluetooth sniffing and hacking hardware platform. We’ve seen some of his hacks in the past, like the build-in guitar tuner and some pink pager fiddling. The Ubertooth dongle is his original design based around an LPC1758 ARM Cortex-M3 processor paired with a Texas Instruments 595-CC2400-RTB1 to handle the 2.4 GHz RF communications. Looking at the bill of materials shows a very low cost for the components at just under $30 (if you can get your hands on a PCB to mount them on). He’s written firmware as well as host code to help you up start pulling Bluetooth packets out of the air as quickly as possible.

What can you do with this? That’s up to you, but whatever it is you accomplish, we’d like to hear about it.

9 thoughts on “Ubertooth Board For Bluetooth Experimentation

  1. I think you can do sniffing with a CSR bluetooth module with modded firmware… the modules are ~$15 shipped and the firmware is online somewhere.
    The CSR chips have USB, SPI and bog-standard serial interfaces IIRC.

  2. It is possible to sniff Bluetooth with hacked firmware on a CSR dongle, but that method requires prior knowledge of the target’s address. Project Ubertooth is the first low cost platform that allows passive monitoring of any Bluetooth traffic without such prior knowledge.

    Oh, and if you can’t give your project a silly name, why bother? ;-)

  3. Yes, it is possible to sniff Bluetooth with a CSR chip with hacked firmware, but the solution requires prior knowledge of the target’s address. Ubertooth is the first low cost platform capable of passive monitoring of arbitrary Bluetooth devices without such prior knowledge.

  4. The CC2400 is not fully compatible with Bluetooth. It supports Bluetooth’s modulation scheme (PHY), but its packet handling is incompatible (MAC). Fortunately that stuff can be handled by a separate microcontroller or a USB-attached PC in the case of Ubertooth.

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