This is not very different from collecting visual cues. You can notice a delivery van arriving. You can see the driver's face, same with passers-by. The biggest difference is that a camera needs to be more conspicuous, while a BT receiver can be invisible and undetectable. Much cheaper, too.
What your Bluetooth devices reveal
41–50 of 204 posts
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#42Tangential, sort of: in the early days of mobile phones for the masses, when there was no WiFi/3G in the underground, I will often enable Bluetooth in my phone, look for nearby devices and try to match names and looks. That was before everyone had their "John's IPhone" or "Samsung A55" boring names everywhere and some of us cared to personalise our device's name. Anyone else played this game?
hmmmmm...
2006, sat in a job interview. Interviewer says he'll Bluetooth over a file to me - what's by phone's name?
2006, the year that Tool's 10,000 Days had been released, which I was enjoying and, being a bit of an Edge Lord, I'd named my device after a lyric from Vicarious - which, IIRC fit perfectly into the name space and made me very happy:
> ILikeToWatchThingsDie
Excellent. Still got the job though!
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#43Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence I mean yes, said medical devices are a whole lot less useful to me if they are not transmitting data. For some of this stuff you can't have your cake and eat it too.
I was wardriving my neighborhood and realized my elderly neighbor's CPAP machine is broadcasting some type of BT signal 24/7. I imagine it's transmitting some important stats, but it did make me have a 2nd thought about medical devices being IoT or BT enabled.
> being IoT or BT enabled
Please don’t conflate these two. I have lots of BLE wearables and other sensors. They only send data to my own computer which I control, unlike IoT devices which by definition send to a third party on the Internet. To me it is far more important to protect against strangers on the Internet versus someone wardriving the neighborhood.
On a related note, did you know that EU has a Radio Equipment Directive (RED 2014/53/EU) that came into effect in 2025. It all but guarantees that such Bluetooth communication will be encrypted.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#44[dead]
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#45The project describes - and shows - a web interface.
Is there a simple CLI interface that can be redirected or pipelined into other tools ?
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> even medical devices constantly broadcast their presence I mean yes, said medical devices are a whole lot less useful to me if they are not transmitting data. For some of this stuff you can't have your cake and eat it too.
What forces devices to constantly stream data? You can batch updates and probably save power thanks to it.
Because these BLE devices are so cheap that they don’t have storage. And BLE transmission is already very power efficient: the power consumption of BLE is probably the same order of magnitude as powering flash storage.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
>There where A LOT of access points named "Audi", "BMW", "Tesla" etc. That's one of the funniest things about wardriving with Wigle on your phone. I can often see the SSID of "Jennifer's Equinox", "Jacks Suburban" right after I get cut off by someone in said vehicle. The vast majority of car bluetooth/wifi I see tends to have varying amounts of identifying information. It's almost as bad as the fact that apple still…
This might just be me being uninformed as someone who doesn't drive but how are you seeing what wifi networks are available so quickly right after being cut off? My very naive instinct is that looking at your phone or opening up a menu with the available wifi networks on your car's display seems like it would require a noticeable decrease in attention to the road, so I'd almost expect an uptick in being cut off from…
Small town, phone is on a dash mounted holder. Sometimes I leave Wigle up just to eye every now and then to see how much crap I'm picking up while war driving.
I am not without sin when it comes to driving a car.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#48This could be used for a truly eye-opening art installation: a screen that as you walk by it, tells you when you were last there..
Even wilder would be to buy data on you in real time and display that.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#49Bluetooth desperately needs mac randomization. Wifi mac randomization is welcome, but it doesn't do much when many (most?) people have bluetooth accessories broadcasting a persistent identifier whenever they're on.
> Bluetooth desperately needs mac randomization.
Bluetooth already has a well developed MAC randomization scheme.
Lookup "resolvable private address". The short of it is, your phone can find your headphones or vice-versa, despite one or both having random addresses. The addresses can be regenerated or rotate at an interval (say 15 minutes). The first part of the address is a nonce (pRand), and the rest of the address is a 24-bit hash of pRand with an identity resolving key (IRK). So the other party just listens passively for addresses, and sees if any of them happen to have the right hash.
I don't think this is as airtight as people think it is. Certainly, if you are following somebody and one address disappears right as another appears (rotation), it's quite easy to infer the new/old addresses belong to one device. I tried briefly to convince the Android developers to synchronize that rotation globally.
You can also probably infer that if you see a pair of random MACs arrive, and they have a certain pattern of timing and payload size, you can say with some certainty that they are particular devices, say an iPhone and an Apple Watch. But that requires sophisticated equipment since most Bluetooth LE communication is over a non-cryptographic frequency hopping arrangement.
Lastly, radio fingerprinting is widely known in academia, but requires special equipment.
Re: What your Bluetooth devices reveal
#50I read an article in 2012 about the feds (DHS?) placing Bluetooth enabled devices along I5 in Seattle. They were able to make profiles of people based on what Bluetooth devices they had in their cars. Is anyone familiar with this? I've periodically tried to Google it and can't find anything about it
Possible, but they buy data from the carriers with similar profile possibilities. The DEA operates long standing and pervasive surveillance in “drug corridors” like I-95 from Maine to Miami. They do things like LPR and grabbing passenger pictures.
If Bluetooth is used, it may be a way to get a count of passengers or if the passengers change. I know based on newspaper accounts that they are particularly interested in cars that stop in Philly or Baltimore.
This stuff is frequently used against cops too so they may use the tech in similar ways. If you’re someone worried about getting raided, spotting a large number of new signals at the front door is an early warning potentially.