Apple

Hi all,

We want to design a Blood Pressure monitor which meets the Continua Health Alliance Requirement with TI CC2540. And we develop the app with iOS6.1.3 and iOS7.

Continua means we need comply “Blood Pressure Profile” (write as BLP followed) base on Bluetooth GATT work on BLE.

But there is something conflicting between “BluetoothDesignGuidelines R6.pdf” (write as Guideline followed) and BLP. It is about the pair and bond.

Myquestion：

According to the Guideline (see Appendix A for detail), the Peripheral should reject the ATT request using the Insufficient Authentication error code.

By this way, the Apple product can pair and bond with accessory.

But the BLP(see Appendix B for detail) asks the Peripheral to use the SM Slave Security Request procedure, if the peripheral uses bonding.

So the conflict is the method of triggering pairing and bonding.

I do like this:

When the peripheral received an ATT read request of characteristic, the peripheral judges whether the link is encrypted or not, if the link isn’t encrypted,

the peripheral will send a SM Slave Security Request and reject the ATT request with “Insufficient Encryption” error code. It works well, and the Apple

product does pair and bond with the accessory successfully. But this method is not mentioned explicitly in the “BluetoothDesignGuidelines R6.pdf”, and

will it be OK to use this method in the future? Will Apple still allow do this in the future?

Appendix A:

In the “BluetoothDesignGuidelines R6.pdf”, we found that:

Pairing

The Bluetooth accessory should not request pairing. If, for security reasons, the accessory requires a bonded relationship with the Central, the Peripheral

should reject the ATT request using the Insufficient Authentication error code, as appropriate. See specification, Volume 3, Part F, Section 4 for details.

As a result, the Apple product may proceed with the necessary security procedures.

Appendix B:

In the “Blood Pressure Profile”, we found that:

6.1 Blood Pressure Sensor Security Considerations

All supported characteristics specified by the Blood Pressure Service shall be set to

Security Mode 1 and either Security Level 2 or 3.

The Blood Pressure Sensor should bond with the Collector.

The Blood Pressure Sensor should use the SM Slave Security Request procedure to

inform the Collector of its security requirements. If the Blood Pressure Sensor uses

bonding, it shall use the SM Slave Security Request procedure.

All characteristics specified by the Device Information Service that are relevant to this

profile should be set to the same security mode and level as the characteristics in the

Blood Pressure Service.