A IMPROVED INITIALIZATION ALGORITHM FOR SECURE PAIRING IN BLUETOOTH

Abstract

Bluetooth is an open specification for seamless wireless short range communication of data and voice between devices. It uses radio waves to transfer information, so it is very susceptible to attacks. Bluetooth also has security architecture. The Bluetooth authentication protocol is based on symmetric key cryptography and on a typically numeric and short password called pin or passkey that the user enters into both devices. The protocol is vulnerable to a passive attack in which the eavesdropper brute forces the pin, and then it can recover the link keys shared by two devices. With this secret key any encrypted traffic can be decrypted between the devices as well as, potentially, impersonate the devices to each other. So, a protocol is needed which should be robust against pin guessing attack that means if pin or passkey is guessed by intruder it should be difficult to crack the initialization, link and encryption keys. This dissertation discusses the approach to improve pairing protoc...