Security risks in the short-range communication of ubiquitous application

Abstract

Recently, various applications applying ubiquitous computing have appeared. For instance, health applications have benefited from information and services, which are available from various sensors and medical devices in the surrounding environment. These applications utilize different wireless communication technologies in order to achieve a good connectivity, which is essential in ubiquitous computing. Weak security in wireless networks may ruin the security of the whole application. Hence, it is vital to realize threats, possible vulnerabilities and security assumptions made in these technologies. In this paper, we study Bluetooth, ZigBee and NFC from the security point of view in ubiquitous health applications. In the study, we emphasize security aspects starting from the physical communication layer.