Securing Bluetooth Communication with Hybrid Pairing Protocol
J. T. Lalis, Bobby D. Gerardo, Y. Byun · International Journal of Security and Its Applications · 2014
To improve the level of security of Bluetooth communication, a hybrid pairing protocol based on Diffie-Hellman Key Exchange protocol, MD5 and Hummingbird-2 is proposed. The developed hybrid pairing protocol adopted the DH Key agreement protocol to securely compute both parties’ shared secret key. MD5 hash function is used to solve the problem(s) caused by having a short PIN. This mechanism is integrated with the Hummingbird-2, a lightweight encryption algorithm, to further strengthen the pairing mechanism and at the same time, making it suitable for devices that has limited processing power and memory. This hybrid pairing protocol is expected to increase the security of the Bluetooth devices against known attacks, such as man-in-the-middle attack and eavesdropping, by combining these strong yet lightweight algorithms.