The IEEE 802.15 WPAN working group focuses on the development of consensus standards for personal area networks or short distance wireless networks. These WPANs address wireless networking of portable and mobile computing devices such as PCs, PDAs, peripherals, cell phones, pagers, and consumer electronics, allowing these devices to communicate and interoperate with one another. The IEEE Project 802.15.1 has derived a wireless personal area network standard based on the Bluetooth v1.1 Foundation Specifications.
Published in Chapter:
Evaluating Security Mechanisms in Different Protocol Layers for Bluetooth Connections
Georgios Kambourakis (University of the Aegean, Greece), Angelos Rouskas (University of the Aegean, Greece), and
Stefanos Gritzalis (University of the Aegean, Greece)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 15
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-899-4.ch041
Abstract
Security is always an important factor in wireless connections. As with all other existing radio technologies, the Bluetooth standard is often cited to suffer from various vulnerabilities and security inefficiencies while attempting to optimize the trade-off between performance and complementary services including security. On the other hand, security protocols like IP secure (IPsec) and secure shell (SSH) provide strong, flexible, low cost, and easy to implement solutions for exchanging data over insecure communication links. However, the employment of such robust security mechanisms in wireless realms enjoins additional research efforts due to several limitations of the radio-based connections, for example, link bandwidth and unreliability. This chapter will evaluate several Bluetooth personal area network (PAN) parameters, including absolute transfer times, link capacity, throughput, and goodput. Experiments shall employ both Bluetooth native security mechanisms, as well as the two aforementioned protocols. Through a plethora of scenarios utilizing both laptops and palmtops, we offer a comprehensive in-depth comparative analysis of each of the aforementioned security mechanisms when deployed over Bluetooth communication links.