Abstract
As an open standard for the short-range radio frequency communications, Bluetooth is suitable for Mobile Crowdsensing Systems (MCS). However, the massive deployment of personal Bluetooth-enabled devices also raises privacy concerns on their wielders. Hence, we investigate the privacy of the unilateral authentication protocol according to the recent Bluetooth standard v5.2. The contributions of the paper are twofold. (1) We demonstrate that the unilateral authentication protocol suffers from privacy weakness. That is, the attacker is able to identify the target Bluetooth-enabled device once he observed the device’s previous transmitted messages during the protocol run. More importantly, we analyze the privacy threat of the Bluetooth MCS, when the attacker exploits the proposed privacy weakness under the typical Internet of Things (IoT) scenarios. (2) An improved unilateral authentication protocol is therefore devised to repair the weakness. Under our formal privacy model, the improved protocol provably solves the traceability problem of the original protocol in the Bluetooth standard. Additionally, the improved protocol can be easily adapted to the Bluetooth standards because it merely employs the basic cryptographic components available in the standard specifications. In addition, we also suggest and evaluate two countermeasures, which do not need to modify the original protocol.
Highlights
Bluetooth [1] is an open technology standard for wireless short-range radio frequency communications
In the unilateral authentication protocol [4], each Bluetoothenabled device is referred to as either the claimant or the verifier. e claimant is a device manifesting its own identity to the verifier, and the verifier is a device validating the identity of the claimant. e protocol validates the devices by verifying the knowledge of the shared link key, which is established in the pairing and link key generation procedure
A fact we shall see from the proposed privacy weakness in Section 3 is that the design of the unilateral authentication protocol is extremely error-prone, even though it originated in standard documents. erefore, to avoid the design defects as much as possible, we adopt the formal method to examine the privacy of the improved unilateral authentication protocol in the following
Summary
Bluetooth [1] is an open technology standard for wireless short-range radio frequency communications. Security modes 2, 3, and 4 are all composed of three crucial procedures, i.e., pairing and link key generation, authentication, and confidentiality. In a Bluetooth WPAN application, the attacker may intercept and analyze the transmitted messages among devices. If at this time a device is linked to a user, the identity of the user will be disclosed by his device. To guarantee the privacy of the user, the transmitted messages of the security mode in particular should not be exploited to identify the target device. The attacker may exploit the vulnerabilities in the authentication procedure to compromise the privacy of the user, especially when the Bluetooth-enabled devices are deployed in the IoT environment. Two non-protocol countermeasures are suggested and evaluated for the privacy enhancement
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