Essay on Privacy and Security Issues of the Bluetooth Technology

Bluetooth is a wireless technology for short-range (usually up to a maximum of 100 meters) networking. It is relatively robust, operates on low power, and is a low cost technology. Bluetooth uses a Time-Division Duplex scheme for full duplex transmission. In other words, Bluetooth technology is simply used to connect an electronic device to another without the physical cable. Bluetooth is intended to be a standard that works at two levels:

It provides agreement at the physical level (radio-frequency standard).
It also provides agreement at the next level up, where products have to agree on when bits are sent, how many will be sent at a time and how the parties in a conversation can be sure that the message received is the same as the message sent.

The Bluetooth protocol uses a combination of circuit and packet switching. To send/receive data Bluetooth uses a frequency-hopping spread spectrum technique which makes it difficult to track or intercept transmissions. The Bluetooth standard uses three transmit power classes. These are 1mW, 2.5mW and 100mW. Each Bluetooth device has a unique 48 bit hard-wired device address for identity, which allows for 2^48 devices. Bluetooth devices basically form piconets to communicate. Each piconet comprises of up to eight active devices where one is the 'master' and the rest are 'slaves'. The master searches for Bluetooth devices followed by invitations to join the piconet addressed to specific devices. The 'master' then assigns a member-address to each slave and controls their transmissions. Devices can belong to several piconets. Bluetooth also provides for easy integration of TCP/IP for networking. Bluetooth uses the radio range of 2.45 GHz. This is a globally available bandwidth used worldwide for compatibility. (Danny Briere, Pub. Date: January 2006)

It is a very nice technology but the security issue has to be taken into serious consideration..................

ESSAYS ON TECHNOLOGY