Wireless Security - Bluetooth Stack

When we use Wi-Fi communication (that is based on an 802.11 Protocol), all the layers of its OSI model are involved in the communication. You always have layer 1 that would be a wireless physical layer (modulation and coding). Next, on layer 2, you would have 802.11 header. Then, on layer 3 - all the IP information, and so on.

With the Bluetooth protocol stack it is different as devices do not have to use all the protocols in the stack (all the layers of the communication model). It is because, the Bluetooth was developed to be used by a variety of communication applications, and it is the application, that designates which part of the Bluetooth stack is used by the communication.

The Bluetooth protocol layers, together with their associated protocols are as follows −

• Bluetooth Core Protocol Baseband − LMP, L2CAP, SDP

• Cable Replacement Protocol − RFCOMM

• Telephony Control Protocol − TCS Binary, AT-Commands.

• Adopted Protocols − PPP, UDP/TCP/IP, WAP.

One additional element that you can see on the stack is the Host Controller Interface (HCI). This HCI provides a command interface to the baseband controller, link manager, hardware status, registers. Due to this fact, all the names of the Linux tools that are used for Bluetooth communication are starting from "hci"; example − "hciconfig", "hcidump", "hcitool". You will see all of those tools in action in the following sections.