Bluetooth Low Energy Device Identification Based on Link Layer Broadcast Packet Fingerprinting

Abstract

With the rapid development of the Internet of Things (IoT), wireless technology has become an indispensable part of modern computing platforms and embedded systems. Wireless device fingerprint identification is deemed as a promising solution towards enhancing the security of device access authentication and communication process in the IoT scenario. However, the extraction of features from the network layer and its upper layers often confront restrictions from specific devices: the association with a certain wireless network and the access to the plaintext of the payload. Meanwhile, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) packets have been encrypted above the link layer, which makes those features difficult to extract. To tackle these problems, we introduce a novel method to identify BLE devices based on the fingerprint features in the data link layer. Initially, the BLE packets are collected through a receiver based on software-defined radio technology. Then, fields that reflect device differences in BLE broadcast packets are extracted through traffic analysis. Finally, a MultiLayer Perceptron (MLP) model is employed to recognize the category of BLE devices. An experimental result on a dataset with 15 types of BLE devices shows that the identification accuracy of the proposed method can reach 99.8%, which accomplishes better performance over previous work.