A Location Privacy Analysis of Bluetooth Mesh
Matthias Caesar, Jan Steffan · 2019
Previous research demonstrated that Bluetooth Low Energy beacons enable very accurate indoor positioning. This leads to the question whether a Bluetooth Mesh network could inadvertently serve the same purpose, leading to unexpected location privacy violations. We analyze the information broadcasted by a typical Bluetooth Mesh installation and show that it can indeed be utilized by a potentially malicious smartphone app in order to localize a smartphone user within a building. This is facilitated by the unique advertising address regularly emitted by each mesh node.