Improving the Bluetooth Hopping Sequence for Better Security in IoT Devices

Abstract

The Internet of Things (IoT) is becoming more pervasive in our daily lives and is being used to add conveniences to our everyday items. There are several standards that are allowing these devices to communicate with each other and ultimately, with our mobile devices. However, in a rush to meet market demand, security was not considered until after the device had already been placed on the market. Most of the work done in improving security has been in the area of encryption. However, with the relatively small footprint of IoT devices, this makes strong encryption difficult. The authors' method will show that the current algorithm used to determine the next Bluetooth frequency hop is vulnerable to attack, and will suggest a novel algorithm to more securely select the next frequency to use. They will simulate their solution algorithmically to showcase their approach and in so doing demonstrate that it moves to the next frequency in a more random pattern than the existing model achieves. In this article, the authors present a new framework for improving security that focuses on the timing of frequency hopping, particularly in Bluetooth. The results show that focusing on different timing sequences for how long a device stays on a particular frequency both fits the current Bluetooth Lite architecture and provides adequate security for IoT devices, as it is demonstrably more random that the existing architecture.