Bluetooth
July 29th, 2007
As a necessary first step to getting my wiimote talking to my computer I bought a little USB bluetooth dongle (Linksys USBBT100 which works fine with Linux) and installed the necessary bluetooth stack. When I turned it on and scanned I found three devices within range, all phones, none of which belong to me. Its pretty common-knowledge that bluetooth has a longer range than advertised, but I was surprised to learn that it quite easily connects to other devices through walls or floors.
The people who designed the bluetooth protocol aren’t stupid and they clearly put some thought into making it difficult to eavesdrop or man-in-the-middle the connection with the pairing/encryption thing, but given the number of bluetooth stack exploits, it’ll be a while before I trust a wireless keyboard with my passwords…
Entry Filed under: Tech