Enhancing the Security of Numeric Comparison Secure Simple Pairing in Bluetooth 5.0
Dongkun Hou, Jie Zhang, Ka Lok Man · 2020
Bluetooth wireless technology is widely deployed in consumer electronics such as mobile phones, headsets, medical wearables and so on. Security is a significant concern of users, since such devices collect and store personal data. Security schemes are provided in the Bluetooth Core Specification version 5.0, but they cannot resist the emerging side-channel attacks which can leak long-term secrets through physical manners. In this paper, the security of Bluetooth under side-channel attacks is studied. Specifically, we improved the security of Secure Simple Pairing (SSP) protocol in Bluetooth 5.0 by developing two leakage-resilient methods to resist side-channel attacks. The leakage-resilient SSP protocols are designed using exponent splitting and multiplicative mask leakage-resilient methods respectively to prevent the long-term secrets from being leaked to side-channel attackers. Prototypes of the new and original protocols are realized, and we simulate a set of experiences to evaluate and compare their performance. We find the increased computation cost of the new protocols is slight and acceptable.