BALSAPro: Towards A Security Protocol for Bluetooth Low Energy

The rapid and increasing application of wireless technology, especially Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), provides many benefits to our daily lives. With BLE, the small packets of data can be exchanged over a wireless channel, whereas the data security is a concern. For example, the BLE standards define that if one BLE device with input-output capabilities tries to establish a connection while the other BLE device does not support input-output, an unauthenticated channel will be established. That is, in the worst case, the connection is established where no security is applied. To mitigate this issue, we propose a security protocol, named BALSAPro, at the application layer that complements the existing protocols such as Security Manager Protocol (SMP), which can help establish a secure channel with authentication and non-repudiation, when pairing has not been used. In the evaluation, we implement and evaluate our protocol performance compared with similar work at the application layer. The results demonstrate that our protocol can enhance the security level with less time consumption.