Crowd-Assisted Hardware Identifier Updates for Securing Beacon-Centric IoT Networks

Kang Eun Jeon, Simon Wong, James She, Gabriel Ghinita

Abstract: BLE beacon networks are widely adopted for Internet of Things (IoT) and smart city applications, but they are susceptible to security threats, including piggybacking and spoofing attacks. These attacks can infringe on or even jeopardize the profitability of network owners. To address this issue, BLE beacon packets are often encrypted or updated periodically, which requires frequent synchronization between individual beacons and a centralized server, consuming significant resources. We propose a novel crowd-assisted, secure BLE identifier (ID) updating framework that significantly reduces network overhead. The proposed framework quantifies mobile crowdsourcing participant presence to dynamically adjust the pool size of the required beacon IDs. Our experiments, which factor in real-life user presence information, prove the practicality of our framework, which reduced the network resource consumption by up to 90%.