Like if I have a two way radio and I’m on a different channel, people can just scan for my channel and listen in, so why can’t they with bluetooth
Like if I have a two way radio and I’m on a different channel, people can just scan for my channel and listen in, so why can’t they with bluetooth
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Yes … The thing is that what they hear won’t make any sense… It’s like each pair of devices makes up their own language and unless you learn that language you hear them talking but don’t know what they are saying
Because it is an intentionally scrambled digital signal. In other words it’s encrypted.
Bluetooth uses an encryption that it pairs the keys with during the pairing process. They can see the encrypted data, but isn’t worth much without the keys to decrypt.
You can, it’s more difficult because most Bluetooth systems have encryption and Bluetooth is short range by design.
That doesn’t stop people from intercepting and decrypting the signals.
Never let your Bluetooth connect to something you don’t have control over.
They very much can – the difference is that sensitive Bluetooth signals will (or at least should) be encrypted. Also Bluetooth having a much shorter range makes it a bit harder to pick up the signal, as you have to be reasonably close.
because bluetooth doesn’t just send plain signals like a police radio. it’s more like a secret code between two devices. when your phone connects to your earbuds, for example, they create their private handshake and then encrypt the messages they send. even if someone hears the radio waves, they just get scrambled data they can’t understand without the secret key. police radios usually don’t encrypt, so anyone can tune in.
You could “listen” to Bluetooth radio waves, but it wouldn’t tell you much. The pairing process makes it so the two devices both know a secret key they can use to encrypt their messages so only the other device can understand what they’re saying. If you tried to listen in without knowing that secret key all you’d get would just be meaningless noise.
You can listen in on the pairing. That’s why a lot of devices have screens asking you to enter a code to finish the pairing.
Once the pairing is complete, everything is encrypted, so the signal wouldn’t make sense to any other device.
The pairing process negotiates encryption keys so that’s not possible. (Of course, if you’re not using encryption — for example, with BLE advertisements — all bets are off.) But e.g. using a Bluetooth headset for a call, the data is encrypted.
Bluetooth uses frequency hopping, changing channels sometimes hundreds of times per second. This is to prevent interference more than as a security feature, but it’s a nice by-product.
Bluetooth is encrypted since version 2.1.
Given these two features alone, it would be very difficult to intercept communications.
Bluetooth was initially designed as a wireless one-to-one connection between two devices rather than broadcast. So for example you do not want an unknown mouse to connect to your computer and take control of it. In newer bluetooth version broadcast options have been added, which is not yet common.
The other reason is the short range of bluetooth. It is not like the old radio broadcast which can span a whole city, bluetooth range is effectively just several meters, so you have to very close to the source, particularly when they are moving, in order to maintain the reception.