BLE hidden network

[gaminn]

Hello, Our application consists of 100 BLE static centrals and 1000 BLE moving peripherals. Is it possible to hide our BLE peripherals to be visible only by our centrals so nobody else can block our peripherals (even for e.g. several seconds) by trying to connect to them?

Is this achievable with nrf51822? How?

[Hung Bui]

Hi Gaminn,

You can think of using whitelist. However, our chip doesn't support 100 records in the whitelist (8 static address, 8 IRK). You can try to set up so that all the central share the same (or several) IRK. Then the whitelist should work. Connection request from outsider central will be blocked.

Please be noted that even they can't connect to your peripheral, they can always jam the advertising channel and block all connection request. Another attack method is to do address spoofing, that the outsider central can pretend it has the same address as one of your central. Then there is no way we can stop it from establishing a connection.

The question here is do you really need BLE for your application ? If you don't you can consider using proprietary protocol, such as Enhanced Shockburst.