Secure connections in Bluetooth scatternets

Bluetooth is a wireless networking technology specifically developed for personal area networking and other short range applications. Bluetooth devices can be networked together by forming piconets of up to eight devices, where a single device is the master and the rest are slaves. These piconets can further be interconnected to create a scatternet. A scatternet is formed by allowing bridge nodes to operate in multiple piconets by interleaving their membership. These bridge nodes alternate between piconets by scheduling their participation during disjoint time-slots. Scatternet formation and routing are important problems for the future of Bluetooth. Another equally important issue is security. We describe how Bluetooth security is currently implemented and discuss a number of security attacks. We then describe two scatternet scenarios that warrant secure operation, and propose solutions that meet our security goals of confidentiality, availability, and integrity. A secure scatternet is created by generating contributory link keys between interconnected piconets. We also introduce a new concept that we call Private PANs. A Private PAN is a piconet in which devices are bonded together, and generally also controlled, and. owned, by the same entity. The main purpose of this paper is to extend the scope of Bluetooth security to scatternets.