A Bluetooth low-energy capture and analysis tool using software-defined radio

Wireless protocol analysis is a useful tool for researchers, engineers, and network security professionals. Exhaustive BTLE sniffing – the full capture and analysis of Bluetooth Low-Energy radio transmissions – has been out of reach for individuals to apply to research, engineering, and security analysis tasks. Discovering and following an arbitrary Bluetooth frequency-hopping pattern with a cheap narrow-band receiver is a complex undertaking with little chance of success. Further, the high-end test equipment capable of wide-band processing is prohibitively expensive to small organizations and individuals. This project includes an analysis of the problem, and a description of a wide-band Bluetooth sniffing implementation with open-source software and software-defined radio (SDR) techniques. A number of real-world signal captures are collected and processed, and the recovered Bluetooth data is presented. The resulting implementation is also published under an open-source license.