Bluetooth Special Interest Group (SIG) has announced the Bluetooth core specification 6.1, which has improved a significant improvement in the popular wireless communication protocol.
A new feature highlighted in the latest release is a randomly determined private address (RPA) updates.
“Rangling the time of address changes makes the device activity more difficult to track or correlated over time,” Read the declaration of sig,
A resolvable private address (RPA) is a Bluetooth address designed to look random and is used in place of a fixed MAC address of the device to protect user privacy. This allows reliable devices to re -connect safely without revealing their actual identity.
Currently, the RPA is updated at certain intervals, usually every 15 minutes, which introduces the level of prediction. This prediction can be exploited in correlation attacks, making long -term tracking possible.
Bluetooth 6.1 8.1 8 and 15 minutes (default) improves the confidentiality by random random updates, while also allows custom values between 1 second to 1 hour range.
The controller selects a random value in the defined range using the approved random number generator, and updates RPA. This makes tracking quite difficult, as there is no pattern in price selection.
How new privacy facility works can be found in more information about how Specification document Published with announcement.
Another facility highlighted in the announcement is better power efficiency starting from Bluetooth 6.1, which stems from allowing the chip (controller) to autonomally handle random random RPA updates.
In particular, Bluetooth chip will choose random time intervals and the host will generate and update the RPA internal without waking up the device.
It saves the CPU cycle and memory operations, so a lot of power is saved when the condition is completed. For small devices such as fitness bands, earbuds and IOT sensors, this battery can create a big difference in life.
While Bluetooth 6.1 has taken exciting steps forward, it is important to underline that it may take years for real support in hardware and firmware.
The first wave of chips with Bluetooth 6.1 should not be actually required before 2026, and yet, initial implementation can not immediately expose all new available features, as testing and verification may be required.
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