| Abstract: | Bluetooth standard has been long criticized for various vulnerabilities and security inefficiencies, as its designers are trying to balance wisely between performance and complementary services including security. On the other hand, well respected security protocols like IP secure (IPsec) and Secure Shell (SSH) provide robust, low cost and easy to implement solutions for exchanging data over insecure communication links. Although, the deployment of these mechanisms is a well established and accustomed practice in the wireline world, more research effort is needed for wireless links, due to several limitations of the radio-based connections especially for handheld devices e.g. link unreliability, bandwidth, low processing power and battery consumption. This paper focuses on performance rather than on security, evaluating the efficiency of these de-facto security protocols over Bluetooth connections when low-end handheld devices are utilized. Several Personal Area Network (PAN) parameters, including absolute transfer times, link capacity and throughput, are evaluated. Our experiments employ both Bluetooth native security mechanisms as well as the two aforementioned protocols. Through a plethora of scenarios we offer a comprehensive in-depth comparative analysis of each of the aforementioned security mechanisms when deployed over Bluetooth links. |
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Greek