Two practical man-in-the-middle attacks on Bluetooth secure simple pairing and countermeasures

Author

Haataja, Keijo ; Toivanen, Pekka

Author_Institution

Dept. of Comput. Sci., Univ. of Kuopio, Kuopio, Finland

Volume

9

Issue

1

fYear

2010

fDate

1/1/2010 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

384

Lastpage

392

Abstract

We propose two new Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks on Bluetooth Secure Simple Pairing (SSP). The attacks are based on the falsification of information sent during the input/output capabilities exchange and also the fact that the security of the protocol is likely to be limited by the capabilities of the least powerful or the least secure device type. In addition, we devise countermeasures that render the attacks impractical, as well as improvements to the existing Bluetooth SSP in order to make it more secure. Moreover, we provide a comparative analysis of the existing MITM attacks on Bluetooth.

Keywords

Bluetooth; security of data; telecommunication security; wireless channels; Bluetooth secure simple pairing; information falsification; man-in-the-middle attacks; out-of-band channel; wireless security; Bluetooth; Communication system security; Helium; Information security; Mobile handsets; Optical fiber communication; Personal area networks; Protocols; Radio frequency; Wireless communication; Bluetooth, man-in-the-middle attack; out-of-band channel; secure simple pairing, wireless security;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Wireless Communications, IEEE Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1536-1276

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/TWC.2010.01.090935

Filename

5374082