[BRLTTY] What shall we do with bluetooth passkeys?
Stéphane Doyon
s.doyon at videotron.ca
Thu Nov 16 11:53:05 EST 2006
On Thu, 16 Nov 2006, Dave Mielke wrote:
>> 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.
Yes. I'd actually like to know though: can I change it? Does anyone know?
>> 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.
Apparently I can change the "BT name", which defaults to the serial
number, but not the PIN.
>> 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
Depends. How much code are we talking about here? We already mount the
usbfs for example.
OK I glanced at the passkey-agent.c thingy. It's 300 lines.
I agree that a stand-alone agent might be otherwise useful. And I see what
seems to be considerable dbus connection and registration boilerplate code
in passkey-agent.c, which we might not want to maintain inside BRLTTY. If
that boilerplate code could be factored out, say into a lib, there might
not be much left.
OTOH, there would still have to be some integration with BRLTTY for
convenience:
-BRLTTY knows the bluetooth address, and it's a pain to set that up in
two places,
-some displays have a constant passkey.
-ease of setup...
Options might be to have BRLTTY call out to an independent utility, or
make the utility into a library...
> could, of course, do both, i.e. build the support into brltty and also plead
> with the Bluetooth people for a general command.
We should ask them to include it. We could distribute it with BRLTTY in
the meantime, for convenience, as a separate utility.
>> 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.
Yes, that's what I meant. It should be read from a separate file. Sorry
for being hasty with my comment. The security aspect doesn't seem to me to
be a factor in deciding whether or not to support this directly.
--
Stéphane Doyon
<s.doyon at videotron.ca>
http://pages.infinit.net/sdoyon/
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