Thursday 11 October 2012

Ubertooth and libbtbb Release 2012-10-R1

The latest release of the Ubertooth software is now available.  The 2012-10-R1 release contains numerous bug fixes and minor improvements as well as some large architectural changes.

The host code for both Ubertooth and libbtbb is now easier to compile, with major simplifications to the process for the btbb Wireshark plugin.  Build instructions can be found on the Ubertooth website.

As development has shifted from a subversion repository to a git repository, we no longer have sequential revision numbers to use for release naming.  All future releases will be named using the year and month of release.

When using the latest release it is necessary to update the firmware on your Ubertooth.  Binary firmware images can be found in the release package, and flashed to the Ubertooth using the ubertooth-dfu tool (ubertooth-dfu --write <image-filename.dfu> --detach).  The host code needs to be built and installed before updating firmware images.  Alternatively firmware images can be built using the ARM embedded variant of gcc.

The release notes for the ubertooth 2012-10-R1 release are as follows:

Release Notes

The Ubertooth host utilities in this release require libbtbb-2012-10-R1 or greater, it can be found at https://sourceforge.net/projects/libbtbb/files/

These are just the highlights.  For a complete list of changes since the previous release, see the git log.

 - libubertooth

   The core Ubertooth functions are now packaged as a library, which allows us to have some independence between the core ubertooth functions and the tools that use them, such as ubertooth-* and the kismet plugin.  This should also help with future binary packaging.

 - Firmware flashing

   The ubertooth-dfu tool now attenpts to identify Ubertooth devices and put them in to firmware upgrade mode.  Multiple arguments can also be passed to ubertooth-dfu and will be executed in the order specified ont he commandline.  To flash firmware on to an ubertooth device, use the following command:
     ubertooth-dfu --write <firmware_image.dfu> --detach

 - Bluetooth Low Energy (Experimental)

   Bluetooth Low Energy (Bluetooth Smart) sniffing is experimentally supported by the bertooth-btle tool. The tool can be used to sniff the connection   setup procedure between devices; promiscuous sniffing is available but is extremely experimental. Credit for this achievement goes to Mike Ryan.

 - Ubertooth-follow

   Ubertooth-follow has been added to the set of Ubertooth commandline tools.  It retrieves the clock value from a local device using libbluetooth (bluez) and uses the Ubertooth to hop in time with the piconet.  To build ubertooth-follow use "make clock_debug=true".

 - Git

   Since the last release we have moved the source repository from SVN to Git.  This should not affect the released code, but makes life easier for those of us working on the code.