VIRTUAL CHANNEL BASED PAIRING: A NEW NOVEL SOLUTION STRUCTURE FOR BLUETOOTH PAIRING.

The current pairing procedure between Bluetooth devices has gone under heavy scrutiny in the past few years. One of the main reasons for that is the SSP's (Secure Simple Pairing's) proven vulnerability to MITM (Man-In-The-Middle) attacks. Many attempts at solving the problem have been researched and presented, but none of them have so far been able to satisfy all the existing deficiencies at once. In this paper, we will present a novel solution for correcting the actual root cause of the security problems. In fact, the structure of the pairing itself has been changed in our solution by separating the process from the previously established measures of pairing that are currently used in the SSP. Through changing the communication means from a device based source that might be exposed to external infiltrations to a virtual channel based exchange, many of the risk elements that make MITM attacks feasible are thus mitigated. This paper will start with a short survey of related work that constituted the basis of this research. A detailed presentation of the experiment and its results will follow and clarify the suggested process for this new Bluetooth pairing method. Finally, we will sketch some future research work ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]