[Pkg-bluetooth-maintainers] Bug#384680: Bug#384680: bluez-utils: cannot enable authentication by a PIN

[Filippo Giunchedi]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2007 at 07:07:56PM +0100, Géraud Meyer wrote:
> Actually what I found surprising is that if you later stop bluetooth,
> modify (only) one of the PIN codes (in
> /var/lib/bluetooth/<local_bdaddr>/pincodes or previously in
> /etc/bluetooth/passkeys/ or probably also in the passkey agent), and
> restart bluetooth, then the connection is still successful. I presume
> that once 2 devices have the same key stored in
> /var/lib/bluetooth/<local_bdaddr>/linkkeys and one has been
> authenticated, no PIN code is ever requested again because the content
> of this file is reused instead. Removing the relevant information in
> linkkeys triggers another PIN request as far as pand is concerned. I
> think that THIS information should be written somewhere. I would say
> that it is not specific to pand since hcid seems to handle the
> authentication, but I do not know much about bluez.
> 
> Finally I find `Note to the tech-savvy' to be inappropriate, too
> repulsive a title, since for a PAN connection I see the proposed
> solution as almost necessary: using a passkey agent is not required and
> also to my knowledge (I do not know how to use one even though I looked
> for information) not as easy as modifying the file pincodes. If there
> were a system wide dbus passkey agent available for use this would be
> different and one could probably avoid toying with /var/lib/bluetooth/.
> This last remark shows that PANs is only a small part of th bluetooth
> system that is not as important as LANs. Another hint about that is the
> place of the pand (bluetooth) service in the boot scripts: it is started
> relatively late during the start, so that ssh for instance is started
> before pand. Could a bluetooth network interface be considered  as an
> interface that could possibly be used as a permanent main interface?

this is in fact what happens with bluez 4 where pan is started together with
bluetoothd, plus there's now a dbus passkey agent (bluetooth-agent) shipped with
the package.
also, the note to the tech savvy is gone as there is no need to fiddle with
/var/lib/bluetooth nor there should be

Do you find the actual package/documentation acceptable?

thanks,
filippo
--
Filippo Giunchedi - http://esaurito.net - 0x6B79D401

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.
-- Groucho Marx