Date of Award

2014

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Computer Science

Committee Chair

Feng Zhu

Committee Member

Letha Etzkorn

Committee Member

Mary Ellen Weisskopf

Subject(s)

Bluetooth technology--Security measures, Mobile communication systems--Security measures, Wireless communication systems--Security measures

Abstract

The prevalence of personal mobile devices and the accompanying use of wireless technologies with those devices have seen unprecedented growth in recent years. The ubiquity of these devices combined with the reliance on users for security prevention and mitigation efforts makes these devices attractive targets for malicious intent. We provide an overview of wireless communication security issues and present a method of categorizing those vulnerabilities based on their general root cause. We further illustrate this method by assigning known Bluetooth exploits to those categories. We presented this and further security research to experiment participants in the form of articles, demonstrations, and hands-on projects hosted on a website. We compared user attitudes and intended security behaviors before and after this user education. Our results indicate that user attitudes towards recommended security behaviors changed favorably after we provided them with hands-on, real world projects and demonstrations on wireless security attacks and mitigations.

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