Uncrippling Bluetooth in Windows Vista RTM – Addendum

Ξ January 17th, 2007 | → 3 Comments | ∇ Windows |

Uncrippling Bluetooth in Windows Vista RTM – Addendum

What I missed the first time around and who’s still responsible.

Introduction

I wanted to take a few minutes to touch on this really quick as it seems I’ve helped project a misconception. My lack of substantial reasoning in my article Uncrippling Bluetooth in Windows Vista RTM.

The Beef

I’ve since come across some information tucked nicely away on Microsoft’s website discussing the new plans for Bluetooth. I’ve since discovered that they kept the MS Bluetooth Stack with all the profiles in RC1 and RC2 for testing purposes. That being said their final ideology is to begin enforcing driver signing on Bluetooth devices to coincide with their requirement for direct devices and generally create a more secure operating system (A potential exploit would exist on a machine that requires drivers to be signed but Bluetooth device profiles not to be. I wouldn’t be very secure if you had an unverified device being able to interact with the kernel.) They also want to reprioritize the way Bluetooth devices are handled in the operating system. Using a technology called Synchronous Connection-Oriented profiles. These profiles can only be developed on Vista machines. So this infers that the vendors, who previously expected Microsoft to knock out these generic profiles, are now required to get Vista machines and develop their profiles from square one and still be able to sign their driver using the method only available on Vista platforms.

That being said, Microsoft is still to blame for at the very least not leaving us with a backup plan. It’s completely up to the vendors and now us to find out where to download the profiles. Maybe in SP1 we’ll get a full set of profiles that have been collected from all of the vendors. And they’ll all be signed and be really shiny, I’m sure. Until that point, we’re not going to know which devices will work and which won’t. Natively with Vista’s MS Bluetooth Stack, which I’m sure still isn’t going to be as full featured as the WIDCOMM driver used in my guide

 

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