Billions of devices vulnerable to new 'BLESA' Bluetooth security flaw

Billions of smartphones, tablets, laptops, and IoT devices are using Bluetooth software stacks that are vulnerable to a new security flaw disclosed over the summer.

Named BLESA (Bluetooth Low Energy Spoofing Attack), the vulnerability impacts devices running the Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol.

BLE is a slimmer version of the original Bluetooth (Classic) standard but designed to conserve battery power while keeping Bluetooth connections alive as long as possible. Due to its battery-saving features, BLE has been massively adopted over the past decade, becoming a near-ubiquitous technology across almost all battery-powered devices. As a result of this broad adoption, security researchers and academics have also repeatedly probed BLE for security flaws across the years, often finding major issues.