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There are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth apps on a phone to drain the device batteries. Essentially if you did a ton of device queries

There are some battery draining tricks you can do with Bluetooth apps on a phone to drain the device batteries. Essentially if you did a ton of device queries to every BLE device visible, you could drain the batteries of every device in range. Transmission is probably a heavier battery drain so just making them talk to your phone creates drain. It’s a single device example, but in a bar once I was showing a co-worker once how you could see and interrogate a lot of BLE devices. I pinged someone’s Fitbit, and read that it only had 3% battery left. Then it vanished. I’m pretty sure in the process of asking it to give me the info, it drained the battery.

picture 5y ago
That seems like a neat demo. Out of curiosity, what software/hardware did you use to see and ping nearby BLE devices?
- redleader55 5y ago
  You can do this easily with an Android phone. These are the apps I use: Lightblue nRFConnect BLE Scanner
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I’ve found nRFConnect to be far and away the easiest to get started with.
  - RVRX 5y ago
    LightBlue is available for iOS users as well.
  - pugworthy 5y ago
    Yes many of those are available for the iPhone too. It's crazy how many devices you can find with those apps.
  - RF_Savage 5y ago
    Thanks! nRFConnect looks like a legitimately usefull tool for debugging and fiddling with BLE devices. The nRF51 and nRF52 OTA firmware upgrades also look usefull, has anybody done something arduino like with this?
    - callmemclovin 5y ago
      For the Arduino route I'd heavily recommend the Adafruit Bluefruit boards over the official Arduino BLE boards. Some of the Bluefruit boards are based on the nRF52 and therefore support OTA. The BLE implementation on the official Arduino boards (for example Nano 33 BLE) is okay but IMO Adafruit is doing a better job there.
  - sdoering 5y ago
    I just used nRFConnect and found a device name that was strange to me. Got curious and asked Google. A personal pleasure toy (aka sex toy) that is visible on Bluetooth. Just for fun I walked a bit around in the garden and found the direction where the signal got stronger. I can now deduce with reasonable certainty which of my neighbors home has a remote controlled sex toy in it. As I know the family living there and how conservative they are with their cultural background I would not have expected that. Imagine how I now just could now wait for the parents to make their big yearly holiday. From the website of the tool I know the specs on how long the battery holds when not in use. So if before the end of the holiday the tool is visible in Bluetooth I could reason with a very high degree of certainty that it was the daughter's tool. If it were so this tool would five her away. It would be a liability for her (if it is her tool). If their community knew, they would be appalled. So it is a liability for the whole family as well. They are nowhere near the technical ability to identify this liability I just stumbled upon by chance.
andai 5y ago
I just tried this with the LightBlue app. Interrogated an iPhone. Reported 0% battery then disconnected. lol Update: now I know exactly which model macbook and iphone my neighbor has, whom I have never met. That doesn't feel right somehow.
pugworthy 5y ago
Another thing that's basically a real security hole/opportunity with BLE sniffing is to record the unique IDs of all the BLE devices you can see, along with geo-location data. Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people. Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers. But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.
- Schroedingersat 5y ago
  Why bother with sniffers? Just ask apple and google for their list along with tue identity of the person.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure this has been done for years and is one of the reasons why the truly paranoid always keep bluetooth turned off. Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops. Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
- olyjohn 5y ago
  The government does put Bluetooth trackers all over the place. Cities like to use them for monitoring traffic flows and patterns. But I would not be surprised to find out they do more than just that with the data. Or I would not be surprised if the vendor who makes the hardware also collects and sells that data on top of the tax money they get.

picture 5y ago

That seems like a neat demo. Out of curiosity, what software/hardware did you use to see and ping nearby BLE devices?

redleader55 5y ago
You can do this easily with an Android phone. These are the apps I use: Lightblue nRFConnect BLE Scanner
- sokoloff 5y ago
  I’ve found nRFConnect to be far and away the easiest to get started with.
- RVRX 5y ago
  LightBlue is available for iOS users as well.
- pugworthy 5y ago
  Yes many of those are available for the iPhone too. It's crazy how many devices you can find with those apps.
- RF_Savage 5y ago
  Thanks! nRFConnect looks like a legitimately usefull tool for debugging and fiddling with BLE devices. The nRF51 and nRF52 OTA firmware upgrades also look usefull, has anybody done something arduino like with this?
  - callmemclovin 5y ago
    For the Arduino route I'd heavily recommend the Adafruit Bluefruit boards over the official Arduino BLE boards. Some of the Bluefruit boards are based on the nRF52 and therefore support OTA. The BLE implementation on the official Arduino boards (for example Nano 33 BLE) is okay but IMO Adafruit is doing a better job there.
- sdoering 5y ago
  I just used nRFConnect and found a device name that was strange to me. Got curious and asked Google. A personal pleasure toy (aka sex toy) that is visible on Bluetooth. Just for fun I walked a bit around in the garden and found the direction where the signal got stronger. I can now deduce with reasonable certainty which of my neighbors home has a remote controlled sex toy in it. As I know the family living there and how conservative they are with their cultural background I would not have expected that. Imagine how I now just could now wait for the parents to make their big yearly holiday. From the website of the tool I know the specs on how long the battery holds when not in use. So if before the end of the holiday the tool is visible in Bluetooth I could reason with a very high degree of certainty that it was the daughter's tool. If it were so this tool would five her away. It would be a liability for her (if it is her tool). If their community knew, they would be appalled. So it is a liability for the whole family as well. They are nowhere near the technical ability to identify this liability I just stumbled upon by chance.

andai 5y ago

I just tried this with the LightBlue app. Interrogated an iPhone. Reported 0% battery then disconnected. lol Update: now I know exactly which model macbook and iphone my neighbor has, whom I have never met. That doesn't feel right somehow.

pugworthy 5y ago

Another thing that's basically a real security hole/opportunity with BLE sniffing is to record the unique IDs of all the BLE devices you can see, along with geo-location data. Do this enough places and over time, and you get a map of what devices are where and at what time, with the assumption that the devices are probably linked to people. Expand that to a government placing little innocuous BLE sniffers all over the place collecting data has some pretty evil big brother vibes. Or on everyone's phone so we are all sniffers. But it kind of goes both ways. You could sniff outside a police station and just skim all the BLE devices you can find, and assume with enough data over time the frequent ones are mostly owned by police officers. Then have an app that alerts you any time one of those LEO BLE devices is in range of you. Basically an undercover LEO's Fitbit could give them up.

Schroedingersat 5y ago
Why bother with sniffers? Just ask apple and google for their list along with tue identity of the person.
RF_Savage 5y ago
I'm pretty sure this has been done for years and is one of the reasons why the truly paranoid always keep bluetooth turned off. Creating a BLE based cop detector would be a neat way to sign up for harassment and surprice traffic stops. Unfortunately it would likely also work for identifying other groups.
olyjohn 5y ago
The government does put Bluetooth trackers all over the place. Cities like to use them for monitoring traffic flows and patterns. But I would not be surprised to find out they do more than just that with the data. Or I would not be surprised if the vendor who makes the hardware also collects and sells that data on top of the tax money they get.