AN ENHANCED SECURITY MECHANISM FOR BLUETOOTH USING DIGITAL SIGNATURE ALGORITHMS AND TRUSTED THIRD PARTY

Abstract

This dissertation highlights our work in developing an enhanced security mechanism for the Bluetooth technology. The basic security architecture of Bluetooth, operating at the link layer, is augmented with a mechanism that provides authentication, non-repudiation and integrity. The use of digital signatures and trusted third party form the basic premise and approach in this work in providing stronger security for Bluetooth. A discussion of another significant work by Muller (Muller, 1999) on Bluetooth service layer security is also given. Issues related to Bluetooth security have been discussed in the literature, but almost always in the context of vulnerabilities and attacks on Bluetooth. This project provides a different approach by analyzing Bluetooth security from the performance perspective. A prototype is built based on the proposed mechanism and our analysis indicates that the choice of digital signature algorithms have significant impact on the performance of the prototype.