Can Your Bluetooth Smartwatch Be Hacked?

Yes, especially if you're using a lower-end option. But the well-known brands aren't immune either.

Bluetooth smartwatches have become an integral part of many of our daily lives, providing convenient access to notifications, fitness tracking, and even phone calls, all from our wrists. As these wearable devices continue to evolve, it's crucial to address an essential question: Can your Bluetooth smartwatch be hacked?

Bluetooth smartwatches connect to your smartphone via a technology called Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) that uses the same band as regular Bluetooth but uses different channels for data transmission. To be specific, it uses 40, 2300 to 2.4835 MHz channels.

The primary difference between regular Bluetooth and BLE is that it consumes much less power than the regular BT protocol as one may figure out from the name itself. BLE devices, in this context, your smartwatch, communicate by transmitting advertising packets called beacons.

These beacons advertise the existence of your smartwatch to in-range devices. A device that is listening for those beacons, which in this case, is your smartphone, responds to an advertising packet with a SCAN request. The smartwatch then responds to the SCAN request with more data.

How the data between your smartwatch and smartphone is structured is defined by the Generic Attribute Profile or, GATT. The GATT has a list of the device’s features, characteristics, and services, which allow for a listening device to establish the advertising device’s functionality and how to trigger different actions. Attackers, if able to intercept the advertising device’s beacons will also be able to inspect and then strategically abuse the information present in GATT.

Bluetooth smartwatches are subject to various threats and vulnerabilities. Here are some common attacks:

Before you purchase a smartwatch, be sure to conduct thorough research on its history of vulnerabilities and security implementations along with its other features. Avoid purchasing lower-end smartwatches, and if you do, try to keep the smartwatch unpaired if you’re going out of your home. Besides these practices, here are a few crucial steps to follow:

Smartwatches are great gadgets to boost your productivity, track your health, or just carry around as a fashion piece. However, without the proper implementations in place, your smartwatch could fall prey to adversaries. The major issue with most smartwatches is the lack of an encryption layer on the traffic. Bluetooth encryption is crucial to keeping your data secure.

Debarshi Das is an independent security researcher and a Cybersecurity Trainer with a passion for writing about cybersecurity and Linux. With over half a decade of experience as an online tech and security journalist, he enjoys covering news and crafting simplified, highly accessible explainers and how-to guides that make tech easier for everyone. While he's programming and publishing by day, you'll find Debarshi hacking and researching at night.