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by pptr 761 days ago
That's pretty impressive, but it also has me worried.

Does this mean you could eavesdrop all Bluetooth connections from a single satellite?

1 comments

Yes, but not really. Practically all Bluetooth connections are encrypted. There's a couple of cases where you can intercept the encryption key IF you capture both sides of the initial pairing negotiation. In those cases it's trivial to decrypt, but you have to know when pairing is happening and intercept the packets.

Beyond that case, you'd have to have a secret backdoor into the encryption algorithm, and we don't think there is such a backdoor (AFAIK).

You could of course sniff on all the unencrypted BLE beacons out there, but I seriously doubt that data is interesting enough to be worth a spy satellite network.

Far, far more concerning is the ability for a satellite to effectively jam Bluetooth across the continent. Bluetooth does not handle congestion well, and signal quality degrades very quickly with interference. Imagine your headphones cutting out when this satellite is overhead.