Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

Summary

Dennis Heinze and Frieder Steinmetz One Security Playlists: '39c3' videos starting here / audio Bluetooth headphones and earbuds are everywhere, and we were wondering what attackers could abuse them for. Sure, they can probably do things like finding out what the person is currently listening to. But what else? During our research we discovered three vulnerabilities (CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, CVE-2025-20702) in popular Bluetooth audio chips developed by Airoha. These chips are used by many popular device manufacturers in numerous Bluetooth headphones and earbuds. The identified vulnerabilities may allow a complete device compromise. We demonstrate the immediate impact using a pair of current-generation headphones. We also demonstrate how a compromised Bluetooth peripheral can be abused to attack paired devices, like smartphones, due to their trust relationship with the peripheral. This presentation will give an overview over the vulnerabilities and a demonstration and discussion of their impact. We also generalize these findings and discuss the impact of compromised Bluetooth peripherals in general. At the end, we briefly discuss the difficulties in the disclosure and patching process. Along with the talk, we will release tooling for users to check whether their devices are affected and for other researchers to continue looking into Airoha-based devices. Examples of affected vendors and devices are Sony (e.g., WH1000-XM5, WH1000-XM6, WF-1000XM5), Marshall (e.g. Major V, Minor IV), Beyerdynamic (e.g. AMIRON 300), or Jabra (e.g. Elite 8 Active). Airoha is a vendor that, amongst other things, builds Bluetooth SoCs and offers reference designs and implementations incorporating these chips. They have become a large supplier in the Bluetooth audio space, especially in the area of True Wireless Stereo (TWS) earbuds. Several reputable headphone and earbud vendors have built products based on Airoha’s SoCs and reference implementations using Airoha’s Software Developme...