general information
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An increasing number of mobile devices offer the possibility to establish so called
PANs (Personal Area Networks). These PANs are used to transport data (like contacts,
dates, images, audio streams or other resources) between different mobile devices.
As these mobile devices offer different services, they need to connect and to interfere
with each other. An example for this cooperation between such devices is the use of
headset devices in combination with mobile phones, mp3 devices or organizers.
There exist different technologies to establish a wireless PAN. The commonly used
ones at the moment are IRdA, operating with infrared light, and Bluetooth which is
radio based. While IrDA needs a direct line of sight, Bluetooth does not. Bluetooth,
besides its weaknesses, often is the best choice to connect mobile devices like phones,
PDAs or headsets. In the last time many reports have been published about security
holes that were discovered in different Bluetooth stacks.
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Bluetoothing or Bluejacking on the contrary appeared as a harmless public
sport where small messages are sent to strangers in public places. Bluetoothing does
not use any security hole but a public service that allows the pairing of two Bluetooth
devices.
To pair two devices means to authenticate both devices to each other in order to ask
the user to grant the use of non public services. To initiate the pairing process
the demanding device sends its Bluetooth device name (up to 255 characters) and the
Bluetooth address to the other device. The user of the destination device is then
asked for a common password in order to accept the pairing with the other device.
A device is unlikely to be paired with a strangers device, but the initial process
is enough to display the name of the device which initiated the pairing process (which
is in fact our small message) on the strangers device.
BlueSpy is designed and intended for research and statistic purposes, does not use
any illegal security holes or harmful services.
BlueSpy is also though to be a new and innovative way to automatically advertise
products on public places.
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BlueSpy offers following tasks:
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automatic, periodic scans for visible Bluetooth devices
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the scanning process runs in the background of your Symbian device (but decreases
the standby time of your phone)
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automatic broadcasts of data like business cards (vCards), pictures, messages, advertisements,
...
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audio notification of new Bluetooth devices
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log of all devices that were found
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list services of remote devices
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