Texas Instruments Bluetooth Low Energy Denial of Service and Remote Code Execution Vulnerability [CVE-2018-16986]
On November 1st, 2018, Armis announced the presence of a Remote Code Execution (RCE) or Denial of Service (DoS) vulnerability in the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Stack on Texas Instruments (TI) chips CC2640 and CC2650. This vulnerability has been assigned the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) ID of CVE-2018-16986.
The vulnerability is due to a memory corruption condition that may occur when processing malformed BLE frames. An attacker in close proximity to an affected device that is actively scanning could exploit the issue by broadcasting malformed BLE frames. A successful exploit may result in the attacker gaining the ability to execute arbitrary code or cause a denial of service condition on an affected device.
There are no workarounds that address this vulnerability.
This advisory is available at the following link:
https://tools.cisco.com/security/center/content/CiscoSecurityAdvisory/cisco-sa-20181101-ap
Duncan is a technology professional with over 20 years experience of working in various IT roles. He has a interest in cyber security, and has a wide range of other skills in radio, electronics and telecommunications.