Saving private addresses
Guillaume Celosia, Mathieu Cunche · 2019
The Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) protocol is being included in a growing number of connected objects such as fitness trackers and headphones. As part of the service discovery mechanism of BLE, devices announce themselves by broadcasting radio signals called advertisement packets that can be collected with off-the-shelf hardware and software. To avoid the risk of tracking based on those messages, BLE features an address randomization mechanism that substitutes the device address with random temporary pseudonyms, called Private addresses.