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Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

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Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#111

Post by bzzzt »

calmworm wrote: post #76
brohee wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend worked in an audiophile shop during his physics master and he'd swear the customer base was the most gullible bunch he ever saw... And mostly unswayable by rational arguments. In any case someone ought to shear the sheep....

I suspect some of that disconnect is because hearing itself isn’t standardized. Differences in frequency perception, hearing loss, and training can make two people genuinely hear different things.

Of course people have different hearing, but the audiophile market is overflowing with snake-oil stuff like 'oxygen free copper' cables to 'acoustic resonator discs'. Nobody's proven any of that stuff results in better sound quality (or even different quality after you graduate from junk stuff to reasonable equipment). Seems like an awfully expensive way of experiencing the placebo effect to me.

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#112

Post by kccqzy »

aziaziazi wrote: post #62
watermelon0 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd assume that most people wouldn't want to get back to wired headphones. Transition period was definitely rough, but nowadays bluetooth headphones are substantially better than they were in the past, and it's quite freeing to not have to deal with wires. There are definitely benefits to wired headphones, such as better audio quality and no battery life to worry about, but for those cases there are USB-C DACs.

Brand new devices' batteries are awesome but wear off and need to be changed at some point, if A) the device is designed to let you do that and B) the battery is still in production. You don't really own a wireless headphone. You can see it as a rent, or an ownership that loose its capability when in use.

The word you are looking for is not “rent” but depreciation.

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#113

Post by throwaway81523 »

watermelon0 wrote: post #25
raverbashing wrote: post #7

Ah yes, the removal of headphone jacks, the gift that keeps on giving Funny that there were always some people here pushing bt audio as "the future", whom I can only assume were the technically shallow but very opinionated people that would die on the smallest technical hills

I'd assume that most people wouldn't want to get back to wired headphones. Transition period was definitely rough, but nowadays bluetooth headphones are substantially better than they were in the past, and it's quite freeing to not have to deal with wires. There are definitely benefits to wired headphones, such as better audio quality and no battery life to worry about, but for those cases there are USB-C DACs.

I still use wired headphones. This bluetooth vulnerability makes me laugh.

https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#114

Post by theteapot »

michaelt wrote: post #94
amelius wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly, can't we just ditch BT and send audio over WiFi? One thing less to worry about.

If you think wireless headphones are insecure today, I very much doubt connecting them directly to the internet would improve the situation.

AFAIK Wifi Direct has quite wide hardware support -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wi-Fi_Direct. But few people know about it?

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#115

Post by cloudfudge »

denysvitali wrote: post #12
TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #8

Haven't watched the video yet, but I think this capability was leaked by VP Kamala Harris during her recent interview with the Late Night Show [0]. She stated she doesn't use wireless headphones because she's been in security meetings and knows they're not safe. [0] https://youtu.be/BD8Nf09z_38 (Timestamp 18:40)

Disclaimer: This comment is not intended to be political - I don't care about the specific party she's part of. Out of all the people I would trust on the matter, Kamala Harris doesn't certainly end up at the top of my list, for reasons such as this one: https://youtu.be/O2SLyBL2kdM?si=Zq-EN8zxj4Y_UCwI You also don't need to be in classified meetings to understand that Bluetooth/ BLE (and specifically the way most ve…

It isn't about trust. There's no need to trust Kamala Harris in order to heed "wireless headphones probably have a legitimate security risk." And we know that even if she's a complete moron in this topic area, she's advised by people who should know. Even if you put no stock in her opinion, there is zero security downside (and an awful lot of common sense benefit) to additional caution.

Even before this report, I had a vague feeling that there were probably some security issues with BT headsets, and now it's confirmed in a very concrete way. So whether she is stupid or not, Kamala was right about this.

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#116

Post by Rygian »

crazygringo wrote: post #97
Rygian wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a source that supports your claim, that the market asked for 3.5 mm jacks to go away?

That's not what the parent commenter said. They said consumers don't care , not that they asked for the jacks to go away . You're misrepresenting. But in terms of consumers not caring, yes: https://www.androidauthority.com/ting-headphone-jack-survey-... It's objectively not a popular feature or something the vast majority of consumers are looking for. Most people prefer Bluetooth because you don't need to deal with a…

I understand the figured sense that you describe. It reverses the logical suite of cause and effect. Instead of describing the true cause (Apple chooses to drop the jack) and the consequence (customers "don't care", which I believe is wrong), the conveyed message blames those without a choice: "customers don't care, therefore we should drop the jack".

The survey that you link is built on the premise that "you can pick only three things at most" as a manipulative trick. And since the headphone jack doesn't make it to the top 3, you use it as claim that consumers do not care about the headphone jack. This is not reasoning or stating objective facts, this is just a cop-out.

My claim is that the vast majority of consumers still need at some point in their use of their phone a way to plug 3.5 jacks into their phones somehow, and just put up with the enshittified new way: either buy some bluetooth adapter dongle, or a USB-C low quality DAC, or just give up and find a different solution.

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#117

Post by [deleted] »

willnix wrote: post #110
miduil wrote: post #13

Glad this submission is finally receiving upvotes. This was just shown at the 39C3 in Hamburg, few days back. Common (unpached) Bluetooth headsets using Airoha's SoCs can be completely taken over by any unauthenticated bystander with a Linux laptop. (CVE-2025-20700, CVE-2025-20701, CVE-2025-20702) This includes firmware dumps, user preferences, Bluetooth Classic session keys, current playing track, ... > Examples of…

One of the researchers here. Many people seem to prefer text to videos, which I sympathize with. So please excuse me hijacking the top comment with links to our blog post and white paper: Blog: https://insinuator.net/2025/12/bluetooth-headphone-jacking-f... Paper: https://ernw.de/en/publications.html

[deleted]

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#118

Post by zaptheimpaler »

I couldn't find anything from Sony confirming that these specific vulnerabilities had been patched, so i tried to reproduce the steps from the whitepaper using nRF Connect [1] with my Sony WH-1000XM4 on the latest firmware version.

There was no response to the Get Build Version command, and the Read Flash command returned an error. So tentatively (with false negatives possible), it seems to have been patched on Sony devices. I don't have a linux box with bluetooth handy ATM so I didn't try using the race-toolkit directly.

[1] https://static.ernw.de/whitepaper/ERNW_White_Paper_74_1.0.pd...

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#119

Post by cloudfudge »

I didn't see a summary in here so based on my reading:

  * Certain headset devices from varying vendors have crappy BT security over both bluetooth classic and BLE
  * They implement a custom protocol called RACE which can do certain things with no authentication at all
  * One of the things RACE lets you do is read arbitrary memory and exfiltrate keys needed to impersonate the vulnerable device with your already-paired phone
  * Once you're impersonating the vulnerable device you can do all sorts of things on the paired phone like place/accept calls, listen on the microphone, etc.
This is pretty bad and you can easily see this being used to bypass other layers of auth like SMS verification or "have a robot call me and read me a code." It also makes me wonder if a spoofed device could appear as a HID device (e.g. a keyboard), but it's unclear whether the link key compromise works for new device classes.

So the way to mitigate this is to be certain you don't have one of the vulnerable peripherals or to disable BT. Note that the list of device models sounds *far* from complete because it's a chipset issue. Which makes me wonder if there are cars out there using this chipset and exposing the same vulns. I'd be very interested if anyone has a source on whether any cars use these chipsets.

Re: Bluetooth Headphone Jacking: A Key to Your Phone [video]

#120

Post by wat10000 »

Rygian wrote: post #89
wat10000 wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re just responding to the market. The vast majority of people don’t care about this. Personally, I’d rather have two minutes more battery life than a headphone jack. It’s annoying to have non-mainstream preferences in an area where economies of scale mean every product needs to have mass market appeal. But you might as well complain about the tide coming in.

Do you have a source that supports your claim, that the market asked for 3.5 mm jacks to go away?

The source is the fact that very few phones have them.

There isn't some grand conspiracy to keep headphone jacks out of phones. Why would they do that? You think Samsung or Google wouldn't jump at the chance to sell more phones by putting in a headphone jack, if that would actually help them compete? No, the reason few phones have one is because few people care about it, at least enough to influence their purchasing decisions.

There are plenty of examples of market failures in the world where lack of competition or information prevents consumer preferences from being reflected in product offerings. But smartphone hardware is definitely not one of them.

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