Recurring verification of interaction authenticity within bluetooth networks

Abstract

Although user authentication has been well explored, device-to-device authentication - specifically in Bluetooth networks - has not seen the same attention. We propose Verification of Interaction Authenticity (VIA) - a recurring authentication scheme based on evaluating characteristics of the communications (interactions) between devices. We adapt techniques from wireless traffic analysis and intrusion-detection systems to develop behavioral models that capture typical, authentic device interactions (behavior); these models enable recurring verification of device behavior. To evaluate our approach we produced a new dataset consisting of more than 300 Bluetooth network traces collected from 20 Bluetooth-enabled smart-health and smart-home devices. In our evaluation, we found that devices can be correctly verified at a variety of granularities, achieving an F1-score of 0.86 or better in most cases.