On Security Provision in Demanding Cyberphysical Bluetooth based Systems

During the last few years, short range wireless communication technologies are increasingly utilized in highly demanding applications characterized by strict performance and security demands. Among various respective communication technologies Bluetooth comprises a prominent candidate founding its way in a wide variety of commercial products. Respective implementations offer significant advantages such as low complexity, cost and power dissipation while supporting adequate performance with respect to demanding applications such as video, audio transfer and/or of high criticality such as medical oriented application scenarios. However, as security requirements increase so does the need for advanced state of the art security algorithms' implementations offering enhanced performance, resources conservations and being able to be applied in a variety of technologies. Respective requirements were highlighted in the context of ARMOR FP7 project where Bluetooth based sensors were utilized to acquire required bio-signals related to Epilepsy monitoring. This paper presents the authors' efforts and contributions in two main axes. On one hand a realistic, based on adequate research platform, performance evaluation is undertaken aiming to expose the effect of standard Bluetooth security mechanisms on network performance, as well as critical network parameters. In this context a wide range of network parameters are considered as well as security configurations. On the other hand, driven by identified Bluetooth shortcomings especially regarding security weaknesses as well as technology specific security algorithm utilized, a highly configurable as well as efficient hardware based implementation of a state-of-the-art cipher algorithm is proposed and presented. The main objective of this effort is to present a security hardware module agnostic to the underlying technologies thus able to be easily integrated in any existing or future short wireless communication platform in order to offer a design of increased added value. Additionally, the proposed hardware module is compared to respective competition exhibiting critical advantages in all critical metrics. Summarizing this work offers valuable insights concerning the Bluetooth based platforms performance and behavior with respect to security mechanism while proposing a specific hardware design which can significantly increase security provision without comprising communication efficiency and resource expenditure.