BLE whitelist

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2021-08-16 by nicoboss

bonjour, tout d’abord, je voulais dire que je suis très heureux de participer à cette belle aventure du Bangle !

concerned that my Bangle could be reached by any device via bluetooth, I wanted to use the Whitelist. However, once my phone was added to this Whitelist, Gadgetbridge went through a "connection in progress" "waiting for connection" "not connected" loop without being able to connect.
I then disabled the Whitelist and my phone and bangle connected.
Reiterating the manipulation, I noticed that the address added to the Whitelist was different each time.
I don't have this problem with other BT / BLE devices.
Any idea what could be involved and how to fix it?

[gfwilliams]

Posted at 2021-08-16 by @gfwilliams

Any idea what could be involved and how to fix it?

I'm afraid Whitelist isn't of much use with recent Android phones. If you click 'read more' next to https://banglejs.com/apps/#setting - it says:

NOTE: iOS devices and newer Android devices often implement Address Randomisation and change their Bluetooth address every so often. If you device's address changes, you will be unable to connect until you update the whitelist again.

The Address Randomisation is a form of anti-tracking stuff phones started adding, but the downside is obviously if they keep changing their address there is no way to identify the phone :(

The best bet right now is to require a passkey, but failing that if you turn off 'programmable' then the worst anyone could do is to pop a notification on your watch screen - they couldn't actually change any config on your watch.

Also worth noting that usually your phone will stay connected to the watch, and that itself stops anyone else from being able to see or connect to the watch.

[espruino-discuss2]

Posted at 2021-08-16 by nicoboss

Wow, thank you very much, that makes sense when you explain it! Great!