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Re: Recovering from loss of pairing data

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Re: Recovering from loss of pairing data

Subject: Re: Recovering from loss of pairing data
From: Richard Grundy <email@hidden>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2016 20:14:47 -0400

Jason+Tyler, we may have a solution to address this pain... albeit with an NFC hardware dependency. Let me elaborate. In a previous life I worked on a "kiss pairing" solution for mission critical two-way radios and their wireless headsets. The headsets were Classic Bluetooth and we used NFC for out-of-band pin exchange to deliver a secure yet "just works" experience.

At my current company, Flomio, we sell NFC readers for mobile devices and are in the process of implementing the Enhanced Contactless Polling specification to read Apple Wallet passes over NFC. Simply put, we can now send Bluetooth pairing data over an NFC enabled Wallet pass to securely enable a "just works" experience. For this to work though you would need:

Clever orchestration between iOS app, Wallet pass, and the pairing device to request BLE PIN pairing when bonding/connections are failing or uninitialized (may require Bluetooth role switching since I believe only Centrals can make pairing requests)
Programmatic clearing of stale pairing entries that may prevent new pairing from succeeding (similar to Tyler's issue). This seems possible from brute forcing pairing requests in the pairing device firmware as per this SO post.
Dynamically signing and adding a new Wallet pass with NFC support that includes the expected pairing PIN and prompting the iOS user to tap the iPhone6/6s/6+ on the pairing device for "kiss pairing" to complete

May be this is a bit over-engineered for practical purposes but I figured I'd share in case there was interest in the approach. Glad to flesh it out further if needed.

- Richard

Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2016 14:01:21 -0700
From: Jason Conn <email@hidden>
To: Tyler Freeman <email@hidden>
Cc: email@hidden
Subject: Re: Recovering from loss of pairing data
Message-ID: <email@hidden">6797B3E7-A3EC-4D7E-815E-email@hidden>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

Adding an unpair API won’t entirely solve the problem, for example, in the case where the the iOS device has removed the key. It also raises issues related to accessory management, where other ill-behaved apps could nuke your accessory.

Unfortunately, requiring a user to explicitly clean up the pairing is the most secure option that we have at the moment, as there’s no underlying Bluetooth support to deal with unilateral key loss. That said, it’s a pain point that the team is well aware of and is trying to get fixed somewhere down the road.

> On Aug 25, 2016, at 1:47 PM, Tyler Freeman <email@hidden> wrote:
>
> Any plans on making that a better experience? Right now, the only solution is to tell the user to go into Bluetooth settings and unpair manually. When really, a developer could easily unpair programmatically and fix the problem. A user doing it manually doesn't seem very "Apple" to me. Definitely doesn't fall under the motto "Just works" when a user has to do manually what an app could fix for them, given the proper APIs.

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