9. Future Developments and Refinements

 

The Bluetooth security architecture has the following limitations:

  1. Support for legacy applications: The legacy application will not be able to communicate with the Security Manager directly. Instead a Bluetooth "adapter" application is required to process security related calls to the Security Manager.
  2. User Authentication: Only a device may be authenticated under the current security architecture. In order to authenticate a user, application level security has to be used.
  3. Bi-directional traffic: Once a connection is established, data flow is bi-directional. It is not possible to enforce uni-directional data flow.
  4. High level security solution: If a Bluetooth device needs some information from some server over the Internet, then there is no end-to-end security possible. The Bluetooth device connects to the local LAN Access Point which is wired to the Internet and depends on a "higher-level" security solution possibly implemented by the Application.
  5. Preset service authorization: There is no mechanism to define preset authorizations for services.
Future research and development might involve some or all of the points mentioned above. A possible refinement is also to set the trust level of a device specifically for services or group of services instead of having either unrestricted or restricted access to all the services at a time.