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Harden BLE pairing and actually revoke removed phones

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
34/100
Issue type
Bug
Clarity
Mostly clear
Activity status
Active
Tech stack
rust
Domain
embedded-iot, security

Research direction

Read boards/esp/src/lib.rs:80 and the bond management and disconnect handling in ble/transport.rs, especially around line 521; trace how BondStore and the controller lists are updated. The issue identifies several separate security behaviors, including phone revocation, normal disconnect handling, and bond limits. Done means removed phones can no longer connect and ordinary disconnects do not erase bonds; pairing limits and the separate issue linked for Just Works pairing also need review.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

  • Revocation doesn't work. On ESP, RemovePairedPhone / ClearPairedPhones
    (boards/esp/src/lib.rs:80) only edit the in-memory PAIRED_PHONES list,
    which nothing on ESP uses for authorization. The real credentials (LTKs in
    BondStore flash plus the controller filter-accept/resolving lists) are
    untouched, so a removed phone still connects. Remove the bond via
    stack.remove_bond_information, BondStore::remove_bond and
    remove_bond_from_controller (all exist in ble/transport.rs), and drop the
    separate registry or make it the source of truth.
  • Just Works pairing and the boot-time window on buttonless boards: https://github.com/OpenCarControls/firmware/issues/18.
  • Auto-heal is too aggressive. ble/transport.rs:521 treats
    REMOTE_USER_TERMINATED_CONN (a normal phone disconnect) as a security
    failure, so any disconnect during the pairing window wipes that phone's bond.
  • max_bonded_phones isn't enforced on BLE bonds (the store is hard-capped at 8).
  • Later: LTKs are stored unencrypted in flash (flash encryption).
Dominant language
Rust
Stars
1
Forks
0
Avg merge
10h 56m
Merged PRs (30d)
15

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