A Lightweight Security Protocol for Beacons BLE
Karla Jocelyn Campos-Cruz, Cuauhtémoc Mancillas-López, Brisbane Ovilla-Martínez · 2021 18th International Conference on Electrical Engineering, Computing Science and Automatic Control (CCE) · 2021
The increasing interconnection of everyday devices in the so-called internet of things raises several concerns regarding the security and privacy that must be considered to protect the information emitted by them and the applications that use them. Many IoT devices are equipped with restricted microcontrollers that do not have efficient security systems. One such device is a beacon that emits Bluetooth low-energy signals. Applications using beacons are novel, but they lack security mechanisms due to the Bluetooth low-energy specification and the limited resources of beacons. This paper discusses the main security threats faced by applications using Bluetooth beacons. In addition, a security protocol based on lightweight cryptography is proposed for the establishment of a shared secret key and the generation of ephemeral identifiers as a countermeasure against security threats in these types of applications.