Apple Adopts Bluetooth 4.0. Could It Reject NFC? 250
siliconbits writes "Two months after Apple joined the Bluetooth special interest group board, the company launched the world's first truly mainstream Bluetooth 4.0 devices, namely the new Macbook Air & Mac Mini 2011 editions. The products came only one year after the official core specifications of Bluetooth 4.0 were adopted and it looks likely that Apple fast-tracked Bluetooth 4.0's adoption so that the forthcoming iPhone 5 can use this technology with at least one Apple product. This could mean that the manufacturer is considering giving up on NFC altogether, a technology embraced by all of its rivals."
Re:Bluetooth sucks (Score:4, Informative)
Luckily, apple's bluetooth stack is one of the absolute best out there – I've never actually had a device fail to work with my macs.
Re:This is a bad thing? (Score:4, Informative)
First, BlueTooth 2.1 and up supports Secure Simple Pairing, which has several security modes from "no-config encryption only" to "hardware authentication dongles":
1. Just works. A fully automatic encryption-only system that sacrifices protection against MitM attacks for the convenience of not requiring any user input. Think self-signed SSL certificates -- it's easy to use and secure against eavesdropping but vulnerable to active attacks.
2. Numeric comparison. Adds authentication to the "Just Works" method by displaying a passkey on both devices and asking the user to ensure they match. The only input required from the user is their acknowledgement that the displayed codes match.
3. Passkey entry. Like legacy pairing, but the passkey is 6 digits and is generated by one of the hosts and typed into the other (as opposed to the old 4-digit passkeys that may be user-selected and entered on both hosts).
4. Out-of-band. Bluetooth allows the exchange of authentication data entirely outside the BT data stream, allowing integration with other authentication and communications mechanisms. This allows for integration with hardware dongles or SSL certificates or whatever other sort trust system you'd like to establish for authentication.
Second, even for legacy pairing, isn't it easy enough to just try "0000" and "1234" when attempting to connect to a new device, and only prompt for user input of neither of those codes work?