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UWB is essential for secure vehicle unlocking. Bluetooth isn't, because it can be relayed. It'll give Apple a nice integration point with your new car. For sco
by tlb 7y ago
UWB is essential for secure vehicle unlocking. Bluetooth isn't, because it can be relayed. It'll give Apple a nice integration point with your new car.
For scooter rental, it'll be way smoother than opening an app and scanning a QR code. You can just step on the scooter and go.
(My wife hates the QR-code scooter app experience so much that I generally unlock both scooters under my own ID when we're going around together. Fun fact: there are geocoded low-speed zones in Paris, where it limits the scooter to 10 kph in some crowded pedestrian areas. Fine. But when you unlock two scooters with the same phone, it uses the GPS location of the phone to decide when to limit or un-limit the speed. And a lost Bluetooth connection can leave it stuck at low speed. But I digress.)
UWB will also improve the ergonomics of contactless payment. With the current system, you have to hold your phone really close to the reader for a few seconds. UWB could allow an instant gesture.
EDIT: removed fatuous intro
- Nextgrid 7y agoCan't the relay problem be solved by having time of flight measurements as any relay attempt would inherently take more time than what a direct communication would? I'm pretty sure that's what they're doing with the macOS Apple Watch unlock.
- tlb 7y agoYes, time of flight is what UWB measures. But Bluetooth isn't suitable for measuring TOF to a useful accuracy. (I'm not sure what the Watch unlock feature is using.)
- ryacko 7y agoThere’s two ways to triangulate, another is using two antenas and attempting to estimate the power of the signal source.
- tlb 7y agoYou can spoof that too, with a relay. In fact, just putting the relay transmit antenna in the expected place should give the right ratio of RSSI.
- ryacko 7y agoSeems silly to imagine, but it is possible and I didn’t consider that.
- Gibbon1 7y agoIn practice this sucks more than one would imagine. In a cluttered environment all you get reliably is close, near, far, somewhere else. Because you have 10-30db multipath fades and attenuation exponents are on the order of 2.5 to 3.5
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- amluto 7y ago> UWB is essential for secure vehicle unlocking. Bluetooth isn't, because it can be relayed. It'll give Apple a nice integration point with your new car. The radio technology involved should have almost nothing to do with the ability to perform a relay attack. There are two straightforward mitigations: 1. Timing. The two parties confirm that a message can round trip in a specified, very short time T. This proves that the distance between the parties is T/2c or less. To be useful, T should be, say, 20ns or less, which requires a bit of clever crypto to make the actual exchange fast enough. 2. The transmitter attempts to localize itself, using GPS or other technologies, and refuses to authenticate unless it’s near the receiver. There is reason to believe that UWB will help with localization. I see no reason it would be any better than any other technology for time-of-flight measurements unless sub-nanosecond resolution is needed.
- tlb 7y agoBluetooth uses frequency hopping, which is unsuitable for measuring TOF. This group tried it: https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01995171/document https://hal.inria.fr/hal-01995171/document and even with a lot of cleverness they were seeing 100 foot RMS errors from Bluetooth. Not enough to prevent stealing someone's car parked in their driveway while their phone is in the house.
- amluto 7y agoThey’re using unmodified hardware and minimally modified software. It would be interesting to see how much precision could be achieved with hardware modifications.
- jazzyjackson 7y agoWell sure, but at that point is it still Bluetooth?
- kalleboo 7y agoInstead of Bluetooth (which Apple could totally fudge on their own devices if they wanted to), the TOF for the Apple Watch<>Mac auto-unlock uses Wi-Fi 802.11v. It seems really quick too (presumably the Mac is establishing a short-lived AP), would work fine for unlocking a car.
- jws 7y agoMaybe someone cares to speculate about replacing Bluetooth for AirPods. It fits easily in the bandwidth of UWB. AirPods are ideal candidates for better locating ability. I can’t say for certain but a rough googling suggests that the radio accounts for the bulk of the energy used in an AirPod, and UWB appears to have better efficiency per bit.
- bredren 7y agoI’ve made guesses at specific product applications based on forthcoming tech from Apple before and the focus is too narrow. It may _also_ be good for secure vehicle unlocking but it wouldn’t make it in unless it has a dozen more useful and ecosystem expanding product applications.
- csande17 7y agoI dunno, Apple's put some pretty single-purpose hardware into their devices in the past. Like the sensor array that's pretty much only useful for Face ID, and the Force Touch stuff. (And Macs used to have an IR receiver, which IIRC was only used for compatibility with the old Apple TV remote.)
- bredren 7y agoDo you feel the object tracking tags (immediate global object tracking) eclipse or equal utility secure vehicle unlocking?
- csande17 7y agoI could totally see Apple only ever using this for the tracking tags (with a hastily-thrown-together the AirDrop feature so they have something to show off when the phone launches) and never letting anyone use it for anything else, regardless of the potential utility.
- microtherion 7y ago> Like the sensor array that's pretty much only useful for Face ID Isn't this used for Animoji as well?
- solarkraft 7y agoIsn't that useless and dead? Now that I think about it: Animoji may have been a justification for the sensor array as in "look, multiple purposes".
- jeffk_teh_haxor 7y ago>With the current system, you have to hold your phone really close to the reader for a few seconds You do? Mine is almost scarily eager to pay the bill.
- bsder 7y ago> Bluetooth isn't, because it can be relayed. Angle of Arrival/Angle of Departure mitigates this. Attempting to relay will screw up the phase relationships. UWB is basically Time of Flight.
- alexkcd 7y agoScooters could be using NFC/RFID payments today (e.g., Apple pay) instead of QR codes. So you could just walk up, tap your phone, and go. UWB offers no real usability advantage here. Scooter companies don't use these methods because they want you to install their app for user retention reasons. So what's missing in your scooter use case is a loyalty mechanism rather than a lack of payment technology.
- jazzyjackson 7y agoAlso you want your scooters to work for the large portion of people who didn’t upgrade to a NFC enabled phone yet QR codes are highly backwards compatible Doesn’t preclude a NFC improvement, but my experience with Scan QR to Unlock has been very good, point the phone at the bike, bike unlocks, not much to improve
- lucasverra 7y agobesides the cost of installation. Printing a qr code << NFC reader. On a 200 dol e-scooter, that is not trivial economy
- delfinom 7y ago>UWB will also improve the ergonomics of contactless payment. With the current system, you have to hold your phone really close to the reader for a few seconds. UWB could allow an instant gesture. This is a security feature, intentionally.....
- ricardobeat 7y agoI don't know which companies operate in your area, but you should be able to simply open the phone's camera and read the QR code, which will then pop open the app. Five seconds tops.