Secure Lifecycle Management of BLE Nodes

Abstract

Aiming the novel applications in the healthcare, fitness, beacons, security, and home entertainment industries Bluetooth Special Interest Group (Bluetooth SIG) has designed and marketed a low power personal area network, which is known as Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). Billions of BLE devices are shipped every year across the world, and these devices have become very common in different types of deployments. The key consideration of this research is to find a suitable way of managing bulk Bluetooth Low Energy(BLE) nodes in any low powered wireless networks, remotely and in a secure manner. Some research in the low powered BLE networks and device management were required to materialize this objective. A literature review was done for that required research. After having a good understanding, which came from the literature review, a study was done to explore a few available device management solutions that existed until today. This study helped to understand the application domains, solutions, and their lacking if there were any. There were some shortcomings in the remote secure management of the vast number of BLE nodes, which become more prevalent in many wireless applications of today. Due to the resource constraints in those devices, it’s not possible to try trusted and tested solutions from other domains here. A couple of different management strategies were proposed to address these issues. The base of the proposed device management solution is the limitations that were found in earlier studies. The theoretical solutions seemed very promising and has been implemented in the lab. The proposed theoretical solutions were implemented and tried in the testbed as a proof of concept. The proposed solutions have eased the secure device management of bulk BLE nodes remotely in any BLE low powered networks. One of the proposed solutions has also opened the possibility to try our trusted and tested IP protocol to manage BLE nodes. The work of enhancing device management in low powered network will continue beyond this thesis.