Maybe I'm living in the past and haven't been informed, but is Bluetooth still unsecure?
Yes, it still is especially since 4.0, and this new update does not seem to do anything to improve it. BT sux.
Care to elaborate?
Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
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Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#42Maybe I'm living in the past and haven't been informed, but is Bluetooth still unsecure?
Bluetooth 4.0 and 4.1 had a broken key exchange that was vulnerable to both passive and active attacks [1]. This could be remedied by a custom in-band or out-of-band key exchange, but I think it was rare for device manufacturers to go to those lengths.
The key exchange vulnerability was addressed in Bluetooth 4.2, which implements ECDH and is at least theoretically secure. [2]
[1] https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot13/workshop-program/pr...
[2] http://blog.bluetooth.com/everything-you-always-wanted-to-kn...
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
Right, I agree that it depends on the device. A Chevy model I don't recall had the stupidest bug where you sometimes couldn't pair unless you reset the car computer... by leaving the driver's door open for 5 minutes. I don't blame the Bluetooth standard though, messy as it might be. That's clearly terrible implementation on the car manufacturer's part.
BT seems over-complicated, especially considering that it's quite often low-level (I really mean that organizationally) firmware engineers working on products that won't be updated after they ship. Given the types of products that are made with BT support, the hostile environments that they're developed within, and the common after-sales abandonment of support, BT should be a simpler protocol that is a LOT more resil…
BT itself is not overly complicated. Bargain basement BT chips, which is what everyone ends up using to save pennies, are full of bugs that have to be worked around. Of the various BT stacks out there, only a few are actually good, and the good ones get to charge appropriate licensing fees, meaning that they aren't in wide use.
When you combine randChip with randBtStack, the end result is not necessarily a quality product. The poor engineers who have to work with this combination end up resorting to sending reset commands to their chip in an attempt to get the damn thing working.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems likely that "more range" also translates to "more robust at existing ranges" (but I have no facts to back that up)
This is what I need. Phone in pocket and Bluetooth headset on neck results in buffer dropouts when I'm mid stride. I have to hold my phone in my hand to get stable playback. And I'm using Bluetooth 4.
I'm imagining a stride which significantly changes transmitter-receiver distance or gets big body parts in the way. The Ministry of Silly Walks has a rival.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#45The only reason I like Bluetooth at all is because the alternative is a bunch of USB receivers plugged into my NUC.
But I have to admit that it seems to work pretty well on my iPhone while years ago on other phones I had a lot of disconnects. I have one of the LG around the neck headsets and it's actually really good at this point.
I'd like to see more BT headsets for PC hit the market. The only ones I could find were from Turtle Beach.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#46John Gruber from Daring Fireball has already written his review: > “Next year it will work great” should be Bluetooth’s slogan. http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/06/10/bluetooth-5
That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive. Bluetooth 4 is actually not bad at all in my experience. Pairing is painless relative to old versions; sound quality is flawless; connections are quite reliable. The "strain" is to be expected around other devices since Bluetooth uses 2.4GHz, a very crowded band. I can't speak to the technical bits since I never looked at them, but my experience as a consumer has been…
> That's just gratuitously negative and dismissive
That's the point. If you want a heavily opinionated summary that will likely inflame a fair portion of people, Gruber is your man.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#47I don't need more range or more speed. I need it to reliably connect and stay connected while devices are well within range of each other, and stop breaking every time I upgrade anything. Unfortunately that would require making it less complex, which is about as likely as a broken egg spontaneously reassembling.
As a matter of fact "more range" is quite the opposite of what I want from Bluetooth. Do I really need to have 5000 keyboards within range of my computer at the office, instead of the 100 I already have? I definitely do not.
The main reason they are even increasing the range is for advertisers' rather than users' sake. They want advertisers to be able to "push" ads to people at a longer range.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#48The only reason I like Bluetooth at all is because the alternative is a bunch of USB receivers plugged into my NUC. But I have to admit that it seems to work pretty well on my iPhone while years ago on other phones I had a lot of disconnects. I have one of the LG around the neck headsets and it's actually really good at this point. I'd like to see more BT headsets for PC hit the market. The only ones I could find wer…
>. I have one of the LG around the neck headsets and it's actually really good at this point.
These are great but the real drawback that keeps me from going wireless is still the audio quality. Hopefully this upgrade will be the end of that.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#49Working with Bluetooth on a project last year was a gigantic pain in the ass.
Linux support was reasonably good, though with bizarre quirks and changes of tooling between libbluetooth versions. OSX was a total nightmare.
The project is currently stalled because three days before I had to head off (I was doing all of the programming and troubleshooting on the software side) my collaborators decided to inform me that they would be using a different laptop to what they'd been using for the rest of the project, and when we tried our software with that version of OSX and hardware, it refused to work nicely. We eventually came up with a bizarre pairing ritual that involved removing devices, then quickly adding them, and in a specific order, and then that mysteriously stopped working and now I don't have access to hardware to fix it.
Knowing what I now know, if I'd had my time again I would have recommended ESP8266 based boards instead of the LightBlue Beans we were using. Even though one of our requirements was low power usage (which we certainly got through Bluetooth 4), it probably would have been less hassle to just make the WiFi modem sleep for a period and then transmit in bursts.
Re: Bluetooth 5 will quadruple the range, double the speed
#50What I want from my wireless devices is not more range or speed, but total freedom from wires, especially for charging.
I remember from an Intel demo from a while ago, where they showcased a number of peripherals using their inductive charging tech, where you can just dump them onto a large inductive charging pad along with your phone and tablet without having to fumble with plugging wires into each one. That's the killer feature for a wireless device, in my opinion.