BeeKeeper: Securing Cross-Technology Communication via Channel-Aware Dual-Binding

Abstract

Cross-Technology Communication (CTC) enables direct data exchange between heterogeneous wireless devices, but existing solutions lack security considerations, exposing billions of IoT devices to spoofing, replay, and jamming attacks. We present BeeKeeper, the first comprehensive security framework that protects bidirectional CTC between WiFi and ZigBee devices. BeeKeeper introduces a novel dual-binding mechanism that synergistically combines physical-layer channel reciprocity with lightweight cryptographic protocols. By extracting Instantaneous Frequency-Power Images (IFPI) from natural channel observations, our system provides location-specific authentication without pre-shared secrets. Moreover, the three-phase WiZBeeAuth protocol achieves mutual authentication, while frequency hopping and mesh coding ensure jamming resilience. Finally, extensive evaluation on commodity hardware demonstrates BeeKeeper’s effectiveness: 94.7% attack detection rate, 6.8% throughput reduction and 12.3% CPU overhead. Our work transforms vulnerable CTC into a secure foundation for mission-critical IoT applications, providing a practical solution for securing the heterogeneous wireless ecosystem.