An enhanced passkey entry protocol for secure simple pairing in bluetooth

Abstract

Bluetooth devices are being used very extensively in today's world. From simple wireless headsets to maintaining an entire home network, the Bluetooth technology is used everywhere. However, there are still vulnerabilities present in the pairing process of Bluetooth which leads to serious security issues resulting in data theft and manipulation. We scrutinize the passkey entry protocol in Secure Simple Pairing in the Bluetooth standard v5.2. In this thesis, we propose a simple enhancement for the passkey entry protocol in the authentication stage 1 of Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) using preexisting cryptographic hash functions and random integer gener- ation present in the protocol. Our research mainly focuses on strengthening the passkey entry protocol and protecting the devices against passive eavesdropping and active Man-in-the-middle (MITM) attacks in both Bluetooth Basic Rate/Enhanced Data Rate (BR/EDR) and Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). In addition to increasing the security of the protocol, our proposed model will also signi cantly reduce the computation cost and the communication cost of the protocol. This model can be implemented for any Bluetooth device which uses the passkey entry protocol and is of version 4.2 or greater.