Secure Seamless Bluetooth Low Energy Connection Migration for Unmodified IoT Devices

At present, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) is dominantly used in commercially available Internet of Things (IoT) devices-such as smart watches, fitness trackers, and smart appliances. Compared to classic Bluetooth, BLE has been simplified in many ways that include its connection establishment, data exchange, and encryption processes. Unfortunately, this simplification comes at a cost. For example, only a star topology is supported in BLE environments and a peripheral (an IoT device) can communicate with only one gateway (e.g., a smartphone, or a BLE hub) at any given set time. When a peripheral goes out of range and thus loses connectivity to a gateway, it cannot connect and seamlessly communicate with another gateway without user interventions. In other words, BLE connections are not automatically migrated or handed-off to another gateway. In this paper, we propose SeamBlue
¹
, which brings secure seamless connectivity to BLE-capable mobile IoT devices in an environment that consists of a network of gateways. Our framework ensures that unmodified, commercial off-the-shelf BLE devices seamlessly and securely connect to a nearby gateway without any user intervention.