Bluetooth Security Lore

I sense a great void so far in the question of security and Bluetooth. I have not looked at more than a few percent of the literature. They may have a plausible device-to-device crypto story, but what higher level connections to allow is exceedingly naïve as far as I have seen.

The white paper from Intel, in just one sentence, indicates an awareness of a problem.

I know no simple solutions. I don’t know any solutions for sure. I think the first thing needed is a smart paranoid to think about how the user should influence which printer and keyboard are connected. I can see no evidence of such thinking.

The following list resulted mainly from the Google search “link layer security” bluetooth.

Official Website
Protocol names
Intel: Goals & Architecture Overview
Specification; Technology Overview
HP’s reading
Computer course speaks of security obscurely.
Gartner worries about security.
This company has something for sale. I can’t tell what. an article by its product manager
Two students

Prof. Edward Schneider’s pretty and useful .pdf
I search “service discovery protocol”.
CiteSeer knows 123 articles on this!!! Adding “security” to the search reduces it to 48.

Here is a proposal for SDP which seems to imagine answering questions such as “What is the most appropriate keyboard for this computer to use?”. If there is more than one keyboard in range, I want to know and certainly I want to choose!!!

I quote from “A Novel Group-based Service Discovery Protocol for MANETS”

Hence, it is important for applications to be able to seamlessly discover other remote services/resources present on nearby mobile devices and to carry out transactions with other services. Obviously standard ad hoc routing protocols are unsuitable for service discovery since in the latter case, the destination address of the service is still unknown.
Searching for keywords leads me to think that the only problem they address is finding a match, regardless of security, willingness, propriety, etc.

In Time and Energy Efficient Service Discovery in Bluetooth, “security” appears only as the next to last word in the paper where the admit that they must consider it.

More buzzwords from “Salutation Consortium”: Bluetooth and the Salutation Find-and-Bind