[BRLTTY] What shall we do with bluetooth passkeys?

[Dave Mielke]

[quoted lines by Stéphane Doyon on 2006/11/16 at 09:05 -0500]

>Useless side question: 

We shouldn't limit our thinking to whatever poor support for PINs may exist
within the braille displays of today. Just because others may not have gotten
it right yet doesn't mean that we should necessarily follow the same example.

>is there actually any way to change the PIN on a Brailliant to something other
>than 1234? 

If a braille display uses a standard PIN then that's an argument for brltty
being able to respond to the PIN prompt automatically.

>Are there any other bluetooth displays out there, and do they allow changing
>the PIN?

There are models for which the PIN is determined by applying a function to the
serial number.

>cause otherwise, it's not a big secret :-) and we can set it without 
>asking the user.

We certainly can. Do we want to grow brltty, though, by building support for it
into the core or is a general command ultimately the better path to take? We
could, of course, do both, i.e. build the support into brltty and also plead
with the Bluetooth people for a general command.

>Another vaguely related observation: the security implications of putting 
>the PIN on a file are more or less comparable to securing the API key.

Yes, but that's not exactly what I said. I asked if putting the PIN within a
general file like brltty.conf is a good idea. There's a difference between
storing the PIN in a general file like that and storing it in a separate file
which can have more strict access controls applied to it. Also, you don't
necessarily want to risk your PIN showing up on your screen just because you
want to make other changes to, or show something in, the main configuration
file.

Another point is that BrlAPI now supports other mechanisms, e.g. securing the
session based on who the client user is (for Unix sockets only, of course).

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