MASHABLE: MOBILE APPLICATIONS OF SECRET HANDSHAKES OVER BLUETOOTH LE

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Presented at BlackhatAsia 2017 by

Yan Michalevsky

In this talk, we present new applications for cryptographic secret handshakes between mobile devices on top of Bluetooth Low-Energy (LE). Secret handshakes enable mutual authentication between parties that did not meet before (and therefore don't trust each other) but are both associated with a virtual secret group or community. This property provides strong privacy guarantees that enable interesting applications. One of them is proximity-based discovery for members of private communities. Others are private event organization and head-counting, and smart BLE car-locks. We will introduce MASHaBLE, a mobile application that enables performing secret handshakes over Bluetooth LE communication. We use direct peer-to-peer communication, rather than relying on a central server which results in interesting applications. We will also discuss the specifics of implementing secret handshakes over Bluetooth LE and present our prototype implementation.