Revisiting Bluetooth Security

Bluetooth technology is gaining increasing interest in the research community because of the convenience of exchanging information between wireless devices. As the communication medium is wireless; security is an important concern in this emerging technology. This paper discusses the basic security of Bluetooth technology, some of its shortcomings and presents two new proposals for securing Bluetooth technology. One of the proposals is based on passkey-authenticated key exchange, where security relies on keyed hash function, and the other one is on amplified passkey-authenticated key exchange, where security relies on elliptic curve discrete logarithms problem. The latter provides some additional security services, but with added cost compared to the former one. Both protocols provide mutual authentication, resist known and possible threats, and achieve efficiency compared to other protocols.