Headworx

Every couple of days I'm asked about the future of wireless standards. How is the landscape going to look like  a couple of years from now? Companies are placing their bets. The conventional wisdom has been the number of wireless standards would never be reduced. I strongly disagree with this view. Actually within a few years we may be down to just four. While there are always niche applications requiring some specific radio features, the majority of applications will converge around these radio families: LTE / 5G for anything outdoor. Mobile telephony, mobile wide area data (high speed and low speed). WiFi for generic purpose indoor Internet access for high power devices (such as phones or personal computers). WiGig for ultra high bandwidth applications such as wireless displays and wireless storage (this may include digital cameras if the industry gets together and defines application profiles, which it should have done 15 years ago). Bluetooth for anything that is defin...

What a week! WPA2 has been proven vulnerable to nonce reuse : reinstall and old key as a new key and it starts using the old nonces again. Nonce (a number used only once) is a key concept in the AES cipher. I think most issues implementations have with AES are related to handling nonces and making sure they never are used twice. Nonce has also been central to the Bluetooth mesh architecture and the way it is designed makes the mesh stand apart from other low power communication systems - we have a nonce that is never reset and still occupies effectively only 3 octets in a message. See Section 3.8.5 for details. But that nonce problem in WiFi is not really a serious problem... Because who cares today if a WiFi network is secure or not? Airports, cafes, public hotspots... do we ever really rely on security of these? The answer is no. We rely on the security of our devices and on end-to-end protocols. We've reached the LAN's end. WiFi should not bother about security anymor...

The iPad has found a permanent place in my computer bag. After experimenting with the 12" model, I finally settled with the 10.5" one. It fits better on a crowded hotel conference room table as well as on a airplane coach seat table. During conference calls and committee meetings it serves me perfectly as a 2nd screen for the Lenovo Windows laptop. I can move a WebEx window to it or use it as an auxiliary screen when sharing the main one. This is a very convenient setup. Living almost permanently on a road it is also important to organize connectivity, and while WiFi is prevalent in many places, there are situations when it is not. Such as recently on a high speed train from Switzerland to France. I used to use the WiFi tethering option an Android phone offers, but that has one significant drawback: it consumes a lot of power, draining the phone battery fast. Even the ultra long lasting Blackberry KeyOne is affected. But Android offers another tethering option - using ...

A year ago I was lamenting on the rumors on the 3.5mm audio jack being dropped from iPhones . Now it is no longer available on the latest Android devices either. And guess what? It does not seem to be affecting us at all. The void, if created, is immediately filled. This time the most prevalent wired personal audio connectivity standard, 3.5mm jack, has been complete replaced with the most prevalent wireless personal audio connectivity standard, Bluetooth. And fear not - it just works. I have the Apple AirPods paired with my iPad AND the BlackBerry KeyOne at the same time. Despite all the marketing pitch behind the "W1", Apple has done a great job sticking to the standard specifications, as defined by the Bluetooth SIG. The AirPods not only play music, but they also properly pause / resume when touched. And of course I can use them (or just one of them) to have hands free calls - all using a stock Android phone. Switching back and forth between the BlackBerry and the iP...

Lighting Control Models (Sections 6.2 and 6.5 of the Mesh Model Specification) are the cream of the crop in Bluetooth mesh. Let me explain why I think so. Most of the time when I discuss smart lights, people tend to think they are lights you can control with a phone app or lights that can be controlled by another device, such as a switch or a dimming slider on the other end of a room. To be honest there is almost no "smart" in such scenarios. There is wireless connectivity involved, but the light itself, apart from being connected and responding to incoming messages, is not smart at all. It is a dumb slave server reacting humbly to whatever a client may want it to do. This is how many connected (and called smart) lighting systems are designed. There are client devices, usually in a form of a controller box, that have the smarts built in. The controllers have sensors connected and they run their own clocks and determine what they wat the lights to do. There is software r...