Hi, On Tue, Jun 16, 2009, Timothy Murphy wrote: > 3. I don't understand why one cannot put the Bluetooth PIN > in a file, as one used to be able to do. Most of the times I've heard people requesting this feature it has turned out that they didn't understand what pairing is and what role the PIN plays in it. The purpose of pairing is to create a common link key between two devices. The link key can also be reused in later connections to avoid pairing again. The purpose of the pin is to act as a one-time input in this pairing process to create the common link key. It is the link key that you want permanently stored so you don't need to repair when connecting later, and bluez already does this for you. So, the value of having a fixed PIN somewhere in the system is in most cases rather low since pairing is an infrequent event after which the generated link key is used to establish secure connections between the devices. Having a fixed PIN has also the security implication that anyone who knows your address can create a pairing with you without any knowledge of the local user. However, bluez doesn't want to define or enforce rules for where the PIN comes from. Instead, bluez externalizes the whole process using the agent concept so you are free to have whatever kind of mechanism you want (e.g. reading the PIN from the filesystem) for replying to PIN requests. Johan -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-bluetooth" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
