Towards More Secure Bluetooth Low Energy Beacon Technology
Ehab Bahaudien Ashary · Digital Collections of Colorado (Colorado State University) · 2020
In this dissertation we investigated the security of Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, in particular the beacon systems used to identify geolocation of the users.The vulnerabilities of the current BLE beacon systems were analyzed and an attack application for exploiting such a vulnerability was developed.Three machine learning techniques are developed for identifying the signals of existing BLE beacons and distinguishing them from the those from attackers.To improve the identification, three filtering techniques are analyzed for their performance when working with those machine learning techniques.A new BLE protocol with PKI authentication features for Bluetooth 5.0 was proposed and developed for defending the BLE beacons systems and BLE system in general.Its performance was evaluated on a prototype system and was acceptable for real-time applications.Integrating the new BLE protocol and BLE Beacon Defense techniques into the secure data delivery to right location system was also discussed.