I revised the title many times. Am I giving the impact breadth of what it could be without veering into click-bait?
Bluetooth Low Energy MESH Network, it is built into the OS without any noted country exemption. Although there be will many air gaps, that is not what I mean.
Some questions that came to mind reading it?
- Can China even pull it out of the OS for good measure, hack it?
- Even with topology of some enable, others disable, others wanting security will be reading bluetooth MAC addresses of un-consenting, disabled, for tracking of others whom have enabled, even if they are not being targeted. See below screenshots from the Internet Engineering Task Force presentation.
- Is the Bluetooth freqz and combinatory fields bio-active in any regard of it’s function? Do plants stay healthy around “high intake” Bluetooth whatever that may be?
- They mentioned other devices and Industry being involved, how many devices to we expect to also use this protocol in the future?
- If we mapped it out, all of these devices thus operating, mapped out of the whole network with a Supercomputer, real-time, how much energy do you think it would be? How many BLE pulses per second, in a busy metropolitan area?
- Who pushed for this TRACKING NETWORK I will be partcipating in whether I like or NOT (uptake)?
- Where was the pre-planning market and socio-economic research on this presented beforehand?
- If entities very intent on tracking you, will just disable/refuse the protcol, then why instead would Apple and Alphabet whom introduced the vulnerability, just …make thier own implementation secure?
So we’re going to skip this useless marketing-speak on 9to5 Mac - Here’s how the new Cross-Platform Tracking Detection works in iOS 17.5
As far as I can tell, there is nothing that says it doesn’t perform assessment of the MAC address in range, all of them, for “your” security of course. In fact, it seems in line with what they want to accomplish: Track all the trackers? Later safeguard them with a “Safefilter” online database check when Phone starts?
Did I get it wrong?
When it comes to WiFi Mac’s mobile phones have fudged them for “privacy” for years, if this goes main stream I see the same thing coming in for Bluetooth.
They promise the macs are random but I don’t have much faith in that.
Looking up a real Mac to see what manufacturer it came from is something I do almost daily sorting out network issues for customers and really is not difficult. From there it takes a leap to guess what the device is if it’s name doesn’t help but more often than not it’s easy enough to see what’s out there, the random macs of phones stick out like a sore thumb as they don’t come back as anything usually so you can then track that around the network and see what they are up to that way.
Thank you for adding this, erm, maybe a bit “insider” info, as I always wondered how easy and reliable it was to map MAC to Manufacturer on mobile devices. Given what you say, the IETF tracking database could technically contain, or used as metadta, for another system to identify all device models.
Yeah, and what is that MAC generation scheme Apple/Android uses from a Security standpoint, what conditions make it regenerate and how often? How easy is it to map a “new” random MAC against a Model again when it re-enters the network and fingerprints itself again.
Lots to think about it.
