Simulation of insecure legacy pairing using nRF52840 dongles and nrf Connect for Desktop

Greetings, everyone, I have encountered a configuration(?) problem while trying to setup a lab for a BLE course I am teaching.

The idea is to showcase the vulnerability of legacy connections and pairing. I seek to do that via pairing 2 dongles with legacy connection while capturing the network traffic for decryption later. So my pupils will be able to see the key exchange and bruteforce the encryption.

Now, the problem I encountered is trying to pair the 2 dongles in the Desktop connect application. The pairing fails with "Authentication failed with status BLE_GAP_SEC_STATUS_AUTH_REQ" error.

I connect to the other dongle named after my friend Tomer:

I choose not to use secure pairing:

I get an error:

Now, coincidentally, when I choose to use the secure pairing - it works.

I use sdk 3.0 to compile the DevAcademy solution from lelel 5, exercise 1

So, to summarise, I am looking to explicitly pair dongles via insecure legacy protocol and record it. Is there a configuration setting I missed in either Desctop Connect or the project that forbids connections without LESC? How can I change it? Any help would be appreciated, thanks!

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